Review: Member of the Wedding, 1952

A twenty-six year old Julie Harris plays the 12 year old feature character Frankie, and for the most part does it so smoothly the age difference between portrayer and the portrayed doesn't appear. Frankie is, as they like to say about vulnerable characters in movies, "troubled," which is putting it mildly. Immature and partially feral, the character is on the cusp of pubescent female maturity but is resisting with all her might. Without a mother, and her only actual friend being a much younger cousin who lives next door (played by a young Brandon De Wilde), Frankie is given scant attention by her shopkeeper father and is being cared for, raised and protected by the hired help Berenice (played by Ethel Waters).

Frankie: "Luxembourg" – don't you think that's a lovely name, Berenice?

Berenice: Kind of a pretty name. But it reminds me of soapy water.

The humor of the story comes through dialogue, not through the events of the tale, which are continuously tragic, but the writing keeps puffing lightness back into the tale despite the blows that are falling. This can get pretty hard to do at times, for example when Julie Harris's Frankie tries to force her will on her family, particularly with how she wants for her older brother and his new bride to take her with them on their brief honeymoon before the older brother must report to his army unit. Of course, a 12 year old child doesn't have that much power and her demands are completely inappropriate for the situation, which dissolves into a pathetic scene with Frankie bawling, laying on the ground, with her suitcase tossed onto the street with the chagrined honeymooners fleeing in their car trailing dusty marriage signs and tin cans on strings.

We watch most of Frankie's problems being self-inflicted, accompanied by her inability to recognize the origin point of her troubles. Frankie sneaks out of her home late at night, suitcase again in her hand, with a vague plan of running away. Wandering into parts of her town she's obviously never seen before, where late-night bars are crowded with revelers, pool players, and lonely servicemen, she simultaneously has the appearance of an astonished visitor to another planet and the creeping and growing awareness of her vulnerability. Eventually she'll return home before anyone has noticed she's gone, but not before she has trodden very close onto the lip of the abyss.

Member of the Wedding comes from a theatre play derived from the novel by Carson McCullers, and the "staginess" of the material comes through in this film directed by Fred Zinnemann. A similar problem crops up sometimes with Tennessee Williams' film adaptations, another worker in the field of "Southern Gothic," like McCullers, with characters in psychological distress and trapped inside of rooms, but it cinema it means we the audience are trapped along with them. As a metaphor for the psychology of being "trapped" the scenery is a fairly simple way to get the message across, but it also inflicts visual sameness in a movie that often becomes less and less cinema and more and more the front row seat of a stage play. Zinnemann can't break out of the kitchen, the main set of this tale, very often, and though he tries hard with varying camera angles and pushing the lens up close to faces at appropriate moments, the visual energy of the story is never really is allowed to move forward.

The writing is good, and the dialogue sings with the actors fitting it all together in an expert way. Julie Harris is carrying most of the load as the fast-talking, sometimes manic Frankie who uses talk to compulsively combat some inner anxiety. Her dialogue often veers crazily into "over-talking" that is partially amusing (and amuses our other main character, Berenice) but it also lets us see into Frankie's mind. We can hear how dangerously ignorant Frankie is of what she simply doesn't understand.

Visually the stage keeps making itself known in this film, but in the visual of sweating Member of the Wedding has a metaphor that works in a uniquely cinematic way. The drenched clothing and the faces pebbled with droplets of moisture tells us this is the pre-air conditioning South, but it also reverberates with the tensions that are building up around and inside each of the characters. This pressure and sweating isn't just Frankie, but Berenice and her escalating family troubles, and in a subtle but important way little cousin John Henry who keeps saying he doesn't feel well.

Member of the Wedding is a dialogue-rich but visually starved story, but Julie Harris keeps us cinematically busy when she is on camera. If her portrayal of the intelligent but ignorantly immature Frankie seems over-done, there is at least the excuse that the era of this film and the stage play was a time when "going big" was the height of style, with Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean and a host of other new talents carrying dialogue in a wholly new way of pronounced physicality. Ethel Waters, on the other hand, is a center-mass of gravity in the story, with a pacing unmoved by the frantic actions of Julie Harris, even when it comes down to Frankie, with a mouth full of threats, holding a knife on an unmovable Berenice. The homey stage-set kitchen where we see most of the story of Member of the Wedding taking place thus transforms into an arena for combat (and rescue) but unfortunately this only comes to us from the acting, visually we're looking at the over-familiar stage set. How Zinnemann could have broken out of this limitation isn't clear, but it does give Member of the Wedding a burden a Hollywood film (it was shot on set in Burbank, California) shouldn't have.

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Original page May 2026