Life with Father

Life with Father (1947) is a family comedy directed by Michael Curtiz — watch online on iFILM. Based on the long-running Broadway production by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse — the longest-running non-musical play in American stage history at the time — the film is set in an upper-middle-class New York household in 1883.

William Powell stars as Clarence Day Sr., a red-haired Wall Street broker certain the household runs on his authority alone. Irene Dunne plays his wife Vinnie, who runs it entirely and keeps that fact to herself. The plot accumulates around money, houseguests, teenage sons and one quietly unresolved matter: whether Father has ever been baptized. A young Elizabeth Taylor appears in a supporting role. Powell's Clarence is funny in an unusual way — the bluster is total, the obliviousness is genuine, and Dunne dismantles it so gracefully that neither of them seems to notice. Stream Life with Father (1947) on iFILM.