Mom in the Movies by Richard Corliss & Turner Classic Movies Inc

Author:Richard Corliss & Turner Classic Movies, Inc.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Other Woman, 2011: Natalie Portman tries making peace with her stepson, Charlie Tahan.

SURROGATE MOMS

In the decades when an unwed woman with a child could stoke scandal and banishment from polite society, Hollywood occasionally played the story as a comedy of mistaken identity. In Bachelor Mother (1939), Ginger Rogers is a salesgirl who notices an abandoned newborn on the steps of a foundling home on Christmas Eve and takes it inside to hand to the authorities. They think she’s the mother, and so do the owner of her department store (Charles Coburn) and his playboy son (David Niven). She must declare the child her own, tapping her own unexpected yen for motherhood and winning, under the rules of romantic comedy, a rich husband and a richer father-in-law, who overcomes curmudgeonly scruples to declare, “I don’t care who’s the father—I’m the grandfather!” In similar style, two young masters of romantic comedy movies, screenwriter Norman Krasna and director Garson Kanin, evaded Production Code prudence and created this effervescent charmer of a movie about the unwed nonmother who became a wed mother.

Everything’s proper in The King and I (1956), director Walter Lang’s film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit. The widow Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) has come with her young son to Siam as governess to the children of the King (Yul Brynner) in the mid-nineteenth century. Anna and the King are each emotionally isolated: she as a widow and a foreigner, he as a monarch bred to believe in his own infallibility. When they finally, lightly touch in the majestic “Shall We Dance?” it has the thrilling impact of two worlds colliding in harmony. The King is weaned from his stubbornness by seeing Anna’s deft connection with his kids. She teaches not just their schoolwork but also lessons in independence, even rebellion against their master. And he learns that a woman is more than a concubine; she is a professor of the civilizing impulse.

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