New Picture

Father's Little Dividend (MGM) repeats the formula of last year's highly successful Father of the Bride, with the same principals, scripters and director. Unlike most sequels, it should also repeat the original's success.

Spencer Tracy again plays the suburban paterfamilias who is reluctantly but irresistibly swept past a domestic milestone on a floodtide of warm comedy. This time, just when springtime is making him chipper enough to pinch his wife (Joan Bennett) from ambush, Tracy learns that his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) will soon make a grandfather of him.

Tracy's wife and his daughter's in-laws (Billie Burke and Moroni Olson) begin jockeying to get their loving hands on the expected child. Tracy himself is drawn into the contest as they compete with offers of house space, gifts, suggested names. He suffers other pangs: the fright of finding his daughter a back-to-nature devotee of childbirth-without-fear; the nuisance of patching up her jealous spat with her husband (Don Taylor) ;the strain of rushing to the hospital for a false alarm. His grandson completes the torment by taking a special dislike to him.

The picture's comic coloring of its familiar incidents sometimes comes close to falsifying them. But a skillful script, Vincente Minelli's brisk direction and another topnotch Tracy performance keep the humanity and the fun intact. Admirers of Father of the Bride will not be let down; all they have to fear now is that M-G-M will be tempted to go on working its father lode until the ore thins out.

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