The only prior knowledge that I had of this film is that it was the inspiration for Steve Martin's "not-so-great" movie of the same title.  You can imagine, then, why I didn't have any real desire to see this one, but am I glad that I did.  Where the remake trudged along with predictable zaniness, this one excelled at keeping pace with realistic and often subtle problems that anyone who has had a large wedding, or even been invited to one, must surely be aware of.

Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) sits in a chair in the middle of what appears ground zero of a class 5 hurricane.  He sits there with a wearied look on his face and an even wearier voice and tells us what has put him in the position that he's currently in.  His beautiful daughter, Kay (Elizabeth Taylor), got married.  In a long flashback beginning with Kay's stumbling admission to her mother (Joan Bennett) and father that she may have met the man of her dreams and will probably marry him, we get the entire story.  As Stanley tries to absorb the news that his little pig-tailed girl is a woman, he tries to figure out in a series of hilarious quick paced close-ups who the would-be husband is.  Is it the blow-hard, the rebel, the scholar, the jock, or could it even be the strange one?  It's one of them, but he's not as bad as Stanley assumed.  Buckley (Don Taylor) is the man; he's an entrepreneur with wealthy parents and a good head on his shoulders.

What makes Father of the Bride so charming is Spencer Tracy and his on-screen relationship with Elizabeth Taylor.  There are a number of scenes that pulled at my heartstrings without actually being too saccharine.  It truly seemed that they were Father and Daughter and that there was real love and compassion between them.  Yet, that isn't all.  Spencer Tracy was genuinely funny.  There are movies where he played a gentle man, there are movies where he played a terrible man, but it was movies like this, when he plays a funny character, where he truly shined.  He was a natural no matter what type of role he played, that's what made him so great, and that's what makes this movie one of his best.

All that fan gushing aside, Father of the Bride is also a terrific story of a man who loses his only little girl to the world.  Watching Stanley's struggle to accept the fact of his loss is genuinely sad.  I have daughters myself, so maybe I'm personalizing the story more than some of you reading this possibly could, I don't know, but I think we all know what it's like to lose someone we love regardless of the circumstances of that loss.  It hurts.  It hurts worse than any physical pain that we can imagine (aside from child birth I would assume), and with that fact, we can all relate.

Father of the Bride is a fun movie.  It's also sad and heartwarming.  But more than anything else, it is a classic Spencer Tracy movie.