Main Cast: Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, Brandon de Wilde, Arthur Franz, Nancy Gates
Release Year: 1952
Country: US
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
25-year-old Julie Harris convincingly recreates her Broadway role of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams in the 1952 screen version of Carson McCullers' play. Feeling rejected when her older brother goes off on his honeymoon without inviting her along, Frankie runs away from her middle-class southern home. She endures several other adolescent traumas, not least of which is the sudden death of her bespectacled young cousin John Henry (Brandon De Wilde). With the help of warmhearted housekeeper Berenice Sadie Brown (Ethel Waters), Frankie eventually makes an awkward transition to young womanhood. One of several Stanley Kramer productions released by Columbia in the early 1950s, The Member of the Wedding wisely used several of the original Broadway cast members. Co-starring as a drunken soldier who tries to take advantage of the vulnerable Frankie is former child actor Dick Moore, making his last screen appearance. The Member of the Wedding was remade for television in 1983 (and unofficially "reworked" into the 1991 sleeper My Girl). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Fred Zinnemann's film version of Carson McCullers' classic play features a transcendent performance by Julie Harris. A fragile mood piece, McCullers' play deals with the pain and sense of abandonment experienced by an adolescent girl on the day of her brother's marriage. Embodying the awkwardness, alienation, and moodiness of adolescence, Julie Harris brings twelve-year-old Frankie painfully to life, in a film that could be thought of as a more gentle companion piece to Rebel Without a Cause (1954). Shunned by the more feminine neighborhood girls, the tomboyish heroine takes consolation in the presence of her wise maid Berenice Ethel Waters and her somewhat eccentric cousin John Henry Brandon de Wilde. Sensitively directed by Zinnemann, who brings a welcome naturalism to this delicate material, the film sometimes brings to mind The Search (1948), his film on European post-WWII refugee children. More than anything, one comes away from the experience regretting the paucity of similar screen roles in the career of the justifiably legendary Harris. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Cary O'Dell - Art Director, Fred Zinnemann - Director, Harry Gerstad - Editor, William Lyon - Editor, Alex North - Composer (Music Score), Clay Campbell - Makeup, Rudolph Sternad - Production Designer, Hal Mohr - Cinematographer, Stanley Kramer - Producer, Frank A. Tuttle - Set Designer, Edward Anhalt - Screenwriter, Edna Anhalt - Screenwriter, Carson McCullers - Play Author
