In a Sirk film nothing is quite as it seems. Am I alone in finding rather more going on here under the surface, than might have been expected from a 'family fun' B-picture?
As we'd expect from Sirk, everything is kept tight, the actors take their chances well - not least the two, far from stereotyped house servants, played by Frances E. Williams and Elvia Allman - and there is plenty of genuinely funny comedy, primarily some well-timed phyiscal slapstick from Van Heflin.
Underneath the predictable family ingredients, there is some slightly less genial critique of middle-class American life and love going on. The mockery of Richard Denning's vegan 'Tarzan' character is sustained and trenchant, as is the far from flattering portrait of Virginia Field's careerist TV personality - women, it seems have to know their place in America's safe but stuffy 1950s society.
Yet the ironies are multiplied by the awful emotional ineptness of the two main characters - their idea of how to break the news of their engagement to their children would have seemed as horrific then as now. The 'fun' of American camp life, one step away from natural disaster, sends shivers down the spine. And at the climax, the still moment where Heflin's elder daughter (Gigi Perreau) gives her infantile father a lesson in emotional intelligence comes as a touching tension breaker - this is the first time we've seen any of the characters react or behave in a 'responsible' way. And it takes a child to get the adult to see the truth.
Perhaps I am alone, but I found Sirk's multi-layered social comedy fascinating, like peeling a workaday onion to find a diamond at its heart.
As we'd expect from Sirk, everything is kept tight, the actors take their chances well - not least the two, far from stereotyped house servants, played by Frances E. Williams and Elvia Allman - and there is plenty of genuinely funny comedy, primarily some well-timed phyiscal slapstick from Van Heflin.
Underneath the predictable family ingredients, there is some slightly less genial critique of middle-class American life and love going on. The mockery of Richard Denning's vegan 'Tarzan' character is sustained and trenchant, as is the far from flattering portrait of Virginia Field's careerist TV personality - women, it seems have to know their place in America's safe but stuffy 1950s society.
Yet the ironies are multiplied by the awful emotional ineptness of the two main characters - their idea of how to break the news of their engagement to their children would have seemed as horrific then as now. The 'fun' of American camp life, one step away from natural disaster, sends shivers down the spine. And at the climax, the still moment where Heflin's elder daughter (Gigi Perreau) gives her infantile father a lesson in emotional intelligence comes as a touching tension breaker - this is the first time we've seen any of the characters react or behave in a 'responsible' way. And it takes a child to get the adult to see the truth.
Perhaps I am alone, but I found Sirk's multi-layered social comedy fascinating, like peeling a workaday onion to find a diamond at its heart.