| The Model and the Marriage Broker | |
| Director: | George Cukor |
| Producer: | Charles Brackett |
| Starring: | Jeanne Crain Scott Brady Thelma Ritter Zero Mostel Michael O'Shea Helen Ford Frank Fontaine Dennie Moore Nancy Kulp John Alexander Jay C. Flippen |
| Cinematography: | Milton R. Krasner |
| Editing: | Robert L. Simpson |
| Music: | Cyril J. Mockridge |
| Distributor: | 20th Century-Fox |
| Runtime: | 103 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Gross: | $1.5 million (US rentals)[1] |
The Model and the Marriage Broker is a 1951 American romantic comedy film starring Jeanne Crain, Scott Brady, and Thelma Ritter. Directed by George Cukor and produced by Charles Brackett,[2] the film effectively features Ritter in a rare lead role (as the marriage broker).
The picture was dominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design.
Through her "Contacts and Contracts" company, Mae Swasey busily schemes to bring couples together. It is not very financially rewarding and Mae is in debt, as her friend and businessman sharing the same warren of low rent offices, Doberman, reminds her periodically during their regular games of pinochle. Even one of her seeming successes, Ina Kuschner's impending wedding to handsome young radiographer Matt Hornbeck does not go as hoped, as Ina's gargoyle of a mother stiffs Mae of the agreed-upon $500 commissioneven before he bails short of the altar (and refuses to be talked into returning).
When Mae goes to see another client she gets her lookalike purse accidentally taken by Kitty Bennett, an imperious but fragile fashion model. Searching for something to identify its owner, Mae reads a letter in which Kitty's hot-and-heavy boyfriend apologizes for not mentioning that he is married, but says he wants to keep on seeing her. When the two women get together to exchange purses, Kitty is annoyed upon learning of Mae’s indiscretion and rejects her advice to give the self-admitted "heel" up.
Kitty later comes to apologize for her unkind words, but is really looking for some advice from Mae. When the boyfriend comes to pick Kitty up, on her own initiative Mae send him packing. Then convince his Kitty to spend the night to prevent the couple from reuniting that night. She then pretends that Kitty may have swallowed a missing earring in order to hook Kitty and Matt up.
They hit it off spectacularly, but when Kitty learns about Mae's meddling in introducing them, and her plans to maneuver a commitment-averse Matt into proposing, she ends their budding relationship. Mae, badly shaken, goes away to a resort to think things over.
Before she leaves, Mae Is finally ambushed by Emmy Swasey (whom she has been trying to avoid for some time). Twenty years earlier Emmy stole Mae's husband. Now that she is recently widowed, very well-off, and terribly lonely, she is aware she’s not so cute as she used to be, and wants Mae to find her a replacement. Mae turns her down, less because of the past than because she's not sure about what she does for a living anymore, having been so rattled by Kitty's harsh denunciation.
When Kitty goes to make up with Mae at her office, she runs into Mr. Johannson, one of Mae's clients, who needs help to patch up his relationship. Kitty reluctantly takes the absent Mae's place. Doberman, hoping to find his friend, meets Kitty and tells her how badly she hurt Mae, that Mae thought of her as the daughter she never had, and that Mae helps those who are shy, need a helpful push, and were not gifted with natural beauty and charm. Afterward, Kitty tries to arrange a relationship for Mae with Dan Chancellor, a wealthy Canadian bachelor who has heard of Mae's service. Mae and Kitty become friends again, but Mae, having found out her meeting with Dan wasn't serendipitous after all, comes to realize that she herself will never be lonely as long as she has people to help her but will be so if stuck on a peninsula with a man who can't play pinochle to save his life).
Mae decides that Dan would be a better match for Emmy, since he just wants a good-natured woman who knows how to talk back. Matt and Kitty get past their mutual hesitance and are clearly headed for the altar. Back at her office to stay, Kitty and Doberman resume their running pinochle game, and he surprises Mae by presenting himself as a suitor for her. She's absorbing all this as the film ends.
Walter Reisch who worked on the film said it "worked like a million dollars. Fox production head Darryl Zanuck loved the picture so much that I don't think he eliminated one frame. I don't remember one marginal note in a script of 140 pages. We came in on budget, and Cukor's work was lovely, sensitive. We had a big success, and the reason The Model and the Marriage Broker didn't score an even bigger success was because it came just at the start of the age of CinemaScope and color, and that story certainly did not lend itself to CinemaScope and color. It was very intimate... But when it was finished... Zanuck was so involved in CinemaScope and had put so much money and publicity into CinemaScope that he simply treated this picture as a stepchild."[3]
Bosley Crowther, critic for The New York Times, wrote:
... the bluntness with which these poor people [the ones who go to the marriage broker] are both ridiculed and burlesqued is nothing short of brutal—or insensitive, to say the least. And thus the grotesque portrayals of such performers as Zero Mostel, Nancy Kulp, Frank Fontaine and John Alexander, while intended to be full of fun—and which do have their moments of savage humor—are heavy and heartless, on the whole. However, when Mr. Brackett; his co-authors, Walter Reisch and Richard Breen; his director, George Cukor, and his remarkably able cast get free of preliminaries and square away on a good old-fashioned tale of a nice lady playing cupid to a normal, healthy boy and girl, this essentially romantic picture not only brightens, it hums. ... as usual, it is Miss Ritter who runs away with the show, particularly when she is able to get free of the undertow. Her wisedup air, her cynicism disguising a heart of gold, her barrel-house voice, her sudden radiance have never been better employed.[4]
In Mae Tinée's opinion for the Chicago Tribune:
Miss Ritter is a natural for a role such as this. ... Her lines never sound like dialog, they become her own, and never seem overdone. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the script, which strings its story out a bit too long, for the most part, it's very amusing.[5]
The Boston Globe review noted the film "has a pretty heavy beginning and some slow moments. But after it gets over the hump, Miss Ritter, Brady and the lovely Miss Crain begin playing as though their respective hearts were in it."[6]