The Model and the Marriage Broker

George Cukor may well have directed more good movies than anyone else. Not to say that he was the greatest director of all time. Orson Welles was no slouch. Neither was Sam Fuller. But look at the list of movies Cukor directed and you will see an extraordinary oeuvre.

"The Model and the Marriage Broker" is one of the lesser known of his very good movies. It has beautiful shots of New York. The ensemble cast is uniformly superb. The story is appealing, thanks to Charles Brackett. And Thelma Ritter -- the great Thelma Ritter -- gets to play a title character! (She is the marriage broker -- two words and more letters -- rather than the model, of course.) She could light up a movie the same way Shirley Booth could. Some say she stole movies from others. Here that was not necessary, as she is the star. (Her best performance, for me, is still in "Pickup On South Street." But that is a supporting role.) Shirley Booth did so few. She must have been great on the stage. What a shame for posterity that she made only a handful of movies.

Ritter, however, made loads of them. And this is one of her best. It also is one of Cukor's best. Who could say which is his best? Probably there is no single best. I do feel he was generally better with black and white than in his color outings. And I have a particular fondness for "The Marrying Kind." But who knows? The Judy Holiday and Aldo Ray characters might originally have been brought together by the character Ms. Booth plays so beautifully in this story.

The Model and the Marriage Broker was one of those delightful light comedies that Twentieth Century Fox (and Columbia) did so well in the early '50s. It was released here in Australia as a supporting feature. I saw it then and it's never been seen here since then, sadly, so I'm relying on memory. It's hard to imagine anyone else but Thelma Ritter as the matchmaker, Jeanne Crain was gorgeous and suitably aloof as the model, and Scott Brady was just right as the wolf. George Cukor's direction was flawless: handling sensitive issues without becoming mawkish or cruel, and totally un-self-conscious. It ranks equally with his 'The Marrying Kind' and slightly above his 'It Should Happen to You' (aka 'A Name For Herself'), both made with Judy Holliday at Columbia about the same time. I still remember the classic line delivered by Thelma (as only she could) when she tries to persuade a sad-sack male client to take an interest in the plain-Jane character played by Nancy Kulp: "She's a real live-wire - low voltage, but steady."

I agree with other comments about this being a little-known gem with a terrific cast and that it is a pleasure to see Thelma Ritter in a leading role. Cukor's direction is efficient and he's particularly good with long, unbroken takes which help the actors gain momentum and relate to each other. What I found interesting was that the film is very direct about marriage as an economic proposition and how it is often a business arrangement. The other interesting quality is that many of the scenes are almost surreal in their grotesqueness. I really like seeing Scott Brady in a romantic lead, he's very fresh. The film is interesting as a Fox film made right before their turn to CinemaScope the next year with the somewhat similar, and inferior, How to Marry a Millionarie. This film would have been in color and 'scope if made later. It also has some location shooting which was a growing trend at Fox and other studios during this period yet the pacing and dialogue-driven quality of the film is much like a screwball comedy from 10 years earlier.

"The Model and the Marriage Broker" is a great film find. It has one thing few films have - Thelma Ritter in the lead! In this, she plays a marriage broker trying - and often succeeding - at matching up misfits. When she takes a model's (Jeanne Crain) purse by mistake and vice versa, the two end up in each other's lives, with Ritter dissuading Crain from a relationship with a married man by getting her involved with an eligible bachelor (Scott Brady). Yes, believe it or not - even bald, fat character actor Scott Brady had his palmy days when he was considered a hunk. He was a slightly rougher version of Robert Wagner, in fact, and even had a fan club.

Thelma is fantastic as a woman with a sad past who tries to make the future of others happier. The film is wonderfully directed by George Cukor and written by Charles Brackett. It's one of those dozens of films churned out by the studio back then. Nowadays, when the studios churn them out, they're $20 million flops and not little gems like this one. Jeanne Crain is lovely and the rest of the cast ably supports the leads: Jay C. Flippen, Zero Mostel, Michael O'Shea, Frank Fontaine, Nancy Kulp, and John Alexander. One comment disliked the character played by Brady, but you can't judge men by the standards of today. Like it or don't, the character was pure '50s.

A delightful, heartwarming movie with a marvelous turn by Thelma, who no matter what part she had, was always a star.

Thelma Ritter was a national treasure. She could combine humor and pathos, and the warmth beneath the crusty exterior was always in evidence. Her presence in any film was always one of the high points, but this one is totally hers; she probably has in it the most screen time of any film she was in and, but for the vagaries of Hollywood, should have been first-billed in the credits. She brings great compassion to the character of Mae, who has endured a great loss and as a result has found herself in a business whose goal is to help others.

Under Cukor's sensitive direction, a wonderful script is brought to life (and, in view of his purported concerns about his physical appearance, one wonders if the script's allusions to the lonely and less-than-beautiful people of the world had a particular resonance for him). Dennie Moore, who had played the saucy maid in Cukor's "Sylvia Scarlett" 16 years earlier, shows up and is again a delight.