Year of Release: 1951Country of Origin: USA
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor
Plot outline: In this sequel to Father of the Bride, newly married Kay Dunstan announces that she and her husband are going to have a baby, leaving her father having to come to grips with the fact that he will soon be a grandfather (IMDb).
Father's Little Dividend tells of the trials of the bride's father when his darling daughter whelps her first child. Sounds slightly obvious, does it? Well, if becoming a granddad is that, then it is. But the way it is played by all the principals from the original cast, headed by Spencer Tracy, make for great diversion on the screen. Under the sure-touch direction of Vincente Minnelli, Tracy is sitting down again to remember, in a mood of mild sarcasm, some of the things that have happened to him since last we saw him as the papa amid the debris of his daughter's wedding feast. And among the things that he remembers are the night that his daughter informed him, his wife and her husband's parents that she was going to have a baby; the bristling contention among the in-laws as to a name for and monopoly of the child (all of this far in advance of the date on which it is to be born); the night that his daughter "left" her husband and came home dismally "to live" - and, of course, the alarms and excursions attendant upon the birth. All the way through the picture Tracy does a wonderful job of displaying the agonized reactions of a father and a badly baffled man. And the same goes entirely for Joan Bennett as the charmingly eccentric wife, for Elizabeth Taylor as the expectant mother and for Billie Burke and Moroni Olsen as the other in-laws. Don Taylor does even better as the tormented husband of the girl, and in him one sees the definite glimmers of another distracted father twenty years hence. (NYT)
My judgement: **1/2 out of 4 stars
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