The Happy Time

After Life With Father ran about ten years on Broadway, critics told playwrights to use its formula to produce successful domestic comedies. Samuel Taylor followed their advice in The Happy Time. It is Life With Father with a French Canadian accent, new characters, and a modern attitude toward sex and drink.

Like Father, The Happy Time takes the family son through his encounter with the sex urge, and deposits him safely on the other side of puberty. But sex is not, as in Father, a topic discussed in whispers. To the Bonnard family of The Happy Time, sex is as much a part of life as port before dinner.

And the papa of the film, played by Charles Boyer, is not the pompous autocrat of Father. He is but a chuckling bystander watching the antics of his clansmen, who are notorious in the community because of their many conquests. There's Uncle Desmond, smoothest operator in Quebec, who collects garters and mounts them on cardboard. He inherited his art from Grandpere, still dapper at 67 years and spryly pursuing his latest widow. What story the film has develops when the adolescent (Bobby Driscoll) imitates the attitude of his uncles and gets in trouble.

But the best character in The Happy Time is the lovable dissolute, Uncle Louie, played by Curt Klasner. Louie is a lazy, shaggy fat man who drinks wine out of a water cooler. He is hilarious as the stooge in Desmond's description of how to snatch a chorus girl's garter. Perpetually half-drunk, his arm wrapped affectionately around his water cooler, Uncle Louie steals every scene he stumbles into.