Joyeux anniversaire

Mitzi Gaynor and Niven were quite good as a couple celebrating their thirteenth anniversary. I found the children annoying--especially the son. I found the conflict of the film amusing--Niven, after having consumed too much alcohol, lets it be known to Gaynor's parents that he and their daughter had engaged in relations prior to their marriage. This of course scandalizes Gaynor's parents, especially her mother who feels like a fool for having had a deep heart-to-heart conversation with her daughter (presumably about sex) the night before the wedding.

The other conflict in the film is that Gaynor's parents purchase a television set for the family. Niven deems television detrimental to family life and to people's intelligence and does not want one in the house. A running gag is that Niven keeps ruining the television sets. Anyway, the thing I was most surprised about was the amount of language in the film. While I'm used to 1950s films having more colorful words allowed (the word "hell" or "damn" will be heard once or twice in the film), Happy Anniversary seemed to have more of these words than I'm accustomed to in a film that is still technically in the production code era.

I also found the frank discussion of sex very interesting. At the beginning of the film, Niven and Gaynor's characters clearly sneak off to a hotel for a romantic rendezvous, then there's Niven letting the cat out of the bag about he and Gaynor's pre-marital sex, later, their little girl ends up on television to inquire about her parents' pre-marital sex and how that was negatively affecting their relationship.

There seems to be a recurring problem with films that have one foot in the production code era and one in the budding sexual revolution. They can't really figure out what they are about and wind up having neither the courage nor the quaintness of their convictions on either side. This one is mainly saved by Niven's charm and Gaynor's skill.

I have caught some of this this morning because the little girl that was playing in it was the same little girl that played Helen Keller on The Miracle Worker (1962). Looking quite different here, she puts on a cutesy nails-on-a-chalkboard Shirley Temple (if I may say so) voice which sometimes disturbed me about her earlier work. She looks a little like Natalie Wood or Margaret O'Brien. But her acting was pretty charming. None of the actors did an exceptional job, everybody had some forced moments.

The girl in there is obnoxious and precocious like her brother, she fights with her brother and I know that that can be that way with siblings, especially when they get older but they were still precociously insolent. Even to their parents, the children disregard the rules. That may not have been clichéd those days but it just didn't age well.

The movie pretty much only manages a chuckle out of me. The romance was just saccharine. And some of the scenes were forced.

Happy Anniversary which was known as Anniversary Waltz on Broadway had a good 611 performance run on Broadway in 1954-55 season. Authored by Jerome Chodorov who was having blacklist problems in Hollywood it finally made it to the big screen in 1959 probably for that reason. But the delay knocked the props out of the big gag of the play.

David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor after 13 years of marriage and 14 year of kanoodling with two kids to show for it are having some wear and tear on the marriage. A big issue is Niven's old fashioned views on television, he hates it and won't have it in his house.

In 1954 a lot of people still didn't own a set. But by 1959 when I was 12 years old just about every family did. It was the major medium of entertainment and news and the two hadn't quite blended yet. Niven was not funny, in fact he was downright ludicrous.

And heavens to Betsy he actually admits that he and Gaynor were kanoodling even before it became official. That gets a good row going with her parents.

Gaynor got to sing a song in the film while she and Niven were dancing on their anniversary. Musicals were rapidly disappearing and good thing she got a number in here. But Happy Anniversary will not go down as a great David Niven or Mitzi Gaynor film.

As a young girl, my all-time favorite film star was David Niven. I went to as many of his films as I could. Happy Anniversary was a hilariously funny film. Of course, since television became such an American staple, some might not find the humor in it. I call TV the plug-in drug! So, I have always felt this very funny film was a masterpiece.

David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor, two talented actors, are miscast in this stagy comedy about a married couple whose past catches up to them just before they celebrate their wedding anniversary. The addition of a new to the household television set is the catalyst for a series of not terribly funny mishaps and lots of arguing. The dialogue is trite and stilted, especially coming from the mouths of the child actors, although all concerned sound as though they're reading their lines directly from cue cards. Had the film been shot in colour, it might have livened things up, but as it stands,the black and white photography just adds to the dreary proceedings.Happy Anniversary bubbles like flat champagne.