Life with Father, 1947 starring William Powell and Irene Dunne

Life with Father is a 1947 Technicolor American comedy film. It tells the true story of Clarence Day, a stockbroker who wants to be master of his house, but finds his wife and his children ignoring him, until they start making demands for him to change his own life. The story draws largely on the insistence by his wife that Clarence be baptized and Clarence’s stubborn, sometimes ill-tempered nature. In keeping with the autobiography, all the children in the family (all boys) are redheads. It stars William Powell and Irene Dunne as Clarence and his wife, supported by Elizabeth Taylor as a beautiful teenage girl with whom Clarence’s oldest son becomes infatuated, along with Edmund Gwenn, ZaSu Pitts, Jimmy Lydon and Martin Milner. The film and its audio entered the public domain in 1975.

Plot:
Stockbroker Clarence Day is the benevolent curmudgeon of his 1880s New York City household, striving to make it function as efficiently as his Wall Street office but usually failing. His wife Vinnie is the real head of the household. The anecdotal story encompasses such details as Clarence’s attempts to find a new maid; a romance between his oldest son Clarence Jr. and pretty out-of-towner Mary Skinner; a plan by Clarence Jr. and his younger brother John to make easy money selling patent medicines; Clarence’s general contempt for the era’s political corruption and the trappings of organized religion; and Vinnie’s push to get him baptized so he can enter the kingdom of God.

Michael Curtiz [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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