Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) is a family comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Walter Lang and based on the memoir by Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. Clifton Webb plays their father — Frank Gilbreth Sr., an industrial engineer and one of the early developers of motion-study management, who applies the same logic to raising twelve children.

Myrna Loy plays his wife Lillian, a psychologist in her own right who runs the family alongside her husband rather than in his shadow. The Gilbreth household in Montclair, New Jersey, operates on schedule: there is a system for everything, and any deviation from the plan is treated as a minor emergency. Jeanne Crain plays the eldest daughter watching all of this from the inside with growing skepticism. The film sticks close to its source material — a true account of a real American family — and the comedy comes from how little that family had to invent. Stream it on iFILM.