LIFE WITH FATHER (1947). By Michael Curtiz. A once popular item , from the Lindsay-Crouse Broadway hit, a comedy on Clarence Day's remembrances of his father, ca. 1900, in New York City. With William Powell, Irene Dunne, Edmund Gwenn, ZaSu Pitts, Elizabeth Taylor. The colorful, autocratic, priggish, smug Clarence Day Sr. is meant to be amusing, but he is such a pompous ass that the moments of fun are rather limited. Mrs. Day is an obedient, single-tonish mother and wife, so much of a slave to her lord and master, that I find her alienating. Irene Dunne here is full-time KKK, which, for a long time (and through the Nazi regime) stood, in German Kultur , for what women were supposed to stick to : Kinder, Kirche und Kuche (Children, Church, and Kitchen). "Life" could have been conceived as a document on past times, but it wasn't. Instead, it lays on the sugary idiocy of the whole family with studio and studious "affection." Because of its occasional good bits, the film can still entertain. But it might make the mildest of feminists indignant. (Edwin Jahiel)