The Matchmaker **** (1958, Shirley Booth, Paul Ford, Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine) – Classic Movie Review 7141

Director Joseph Anthony’s vivacious 1958 romantic comedy drama The Matchmaker is an engaging and amusing film version of the enduring, entertaining 1955 Thornton Wilder stage classic about the 1884 Yonkers scheming middle-aged widow matchmaker Dolly Levi (Shirley Booth) who tries to find a wife for skinflint widower store owner Horace Vandergelder (Paul Ford, at the time Sgt Bilko’s dithering colonel on TV in The Phil Silvers Show, 1955-1959).

The delightful performers are effortlessly charming and easily make up for the almost willful lack of cinema technique on display here. The talented Booth and Ford are ideal, giving hilarious performances, while the young Shirley MacLaine (as young milliner Irene Molloy), Anthony Perkins (as Vandergelder’s meek clerk Cornelius Hackl) and Robert Morse (as Vandergelder’s other meek clerk Barnaby Tucker) are sweet and appealing.

Both the play and this film have a vibrant life of their own, and are both unfairly overshadowed by Hello Dolly! in both its stage and movie musical versions. Carol Channing won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1964 for the Broadway musical Hello Dolly! She played Dolly again most recently in 1995. Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau starred in the 1969 movie version of Hello, Dolly!

Also in the cast are Wallace Ford, Perry Wilson, Russell Collins, Rex Evans, Gavin Gordon, Torben Meyer and Sandra Giles.

The costumes are by Edith Head, and the screenplay is by John Michael Hayes, based on the play by Thornton Wilder. Hayes was a Hitchcock regular at this time, writing screenplays for Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

You don’t get this very often – the actors address the audience from time to time, and at the end discuss the lessons their characters have learned!

It proved the last movie role for the 1953 Best Actress Oscar winner Booth (for Come Back, Little Sheba, though she lived till she was 94 on 16 October 1992.

Wallace Ford composed his own epitaph: ‘At last I get top billing!’

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7141

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