The wedding I went to was a bit Four Weddings-ish. All morning suits, posh frocks and popping champagne corks in a country house setting that Agatha Christie would have been proud to be seen dead in. The following day a clay pigeon shoot had been arranged. I was a bit miffed that I hadn’t been asked to partake. After all I am practically an expert. If you have seen my Jason King episode, The Company I keep, you would understand what I mean. Anyway it turned out that after a promising start the clouds moved in and the shoot was cancelled. Which turned the weekend into the sort of malaise which inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. It got me thinking about all those films and TVs which deal with weddings. On TV there is rarely a wedding where either the bride, the groom or the vicar doesn’t turn up. If they do it usually means there will be a fight or a dramatic revelation that the Bride/Groom is either a practising bigamist or on the run either from the police or the loonie bin. Films are a little more sophisticated. Or Not! The only memorable wedding in the 40’s was in Margaret Lockwood’s, The Wicked Lady (1945). Lockwood played the not so lady-like Lady Skelton and James Mason, Captain Jackson, the besotted highwayman who falls in love with her. Lockwood’s wimpish husband doesn’t know what is going on and is amazed when his fragrant wife turns up in leathers in dying mode. The ’50s has Spencer Tracy on the verge of a breakdown while trying to do the best for his soon to be wed daughter in Father of the Bride (1950). Liz Taylor played the exquisite daughter and Joan Bennet the exasperating mother. When all seems lost Spencer Tracy pulls himself together and wins the day. If you really want complications they don’t come more tangled than The Bad Sleep Well (1960). The gorgeous Toshiro Mifune is Koichi Nishi who sets out to woo the boss’s crippled daughter. Mission accomplished we are then invited to the Wedding Reception From Hell where we learn that Nishi is not who he says he is but the son of a man the father of the bride caused to commit suicide. Nishi wants to destroy his bride’s family. He is exposed by the bride’s brother who threatens to kill him if he lets his sister down. (well I suppose it beats a string of bad jokes by a drunken best man) As Nishi sets about his sinister plot he makes the fatal error of falling in love with his bride. And……. I’ve always loved Goldie Hawn. For me she is one of the all too few really funny actresses. So her wedding to soon to ‘ex’ at the beginning of Private Benjamin (1980) takes a lot of beating. What gets me is how true to life it is. Everybody running around, tempers flying, the father frustrated, the mother hysterical, the bridegroom haunted and the bride nervous and not sure about what is happening. It is all beautifully high lighted in retrospect by what she gets herself into by being bamboozled into joining the army. The wedding in Goodfellas (1990) of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) to Karen, (Lorraine Bracco) pays its dues to the Godfather wedding – and then some. Like the rest of the film, it shows the Mafia under a much stronger arc-light than the Marlon Brando outing.
