What a cute movie, especially from a sentimental skeptic like Thornton Wilder. And, okay, maybe sometimes it's a little TOO cute but it's still an awful lot of family fun, filled to bursting with innocence and apothegms.
Anthony Perkins and Robert Morse are two young clerks in the Yonkers store that belongs to Paul Ford in 1884. What a skinflint. He asks for some special treatment from his barber then actually gives him a tip. The barber turns to the camera, holds up a single coin, and says bitterly, "A nickel -- after twenty years." Ford is interested in marrying someone "who will be a housekeeper while thinking she's a home owner." Something like that. The young woman he has in mind is Shirley MacLaine, who manages a millinery store in sophisticated New York City. But everyone's heart remains in the suburbs. "London, Paris, Yonkers," boasts Ford. This was before Son of Sam.
He's a skinflint alright but, like Scrooge, he's completely undone and made to see the error of his ways in a kind of epiphany, by three agents: MacLaine, Perkins, and Shirley Booth as the matchmaker whom he winds up marrying. And after many tribulations and adventures, everybody lives happily -- joyously -- ever after, as long as MacLaine doesn't let Perkins catch her in the shower.
Perkins, Morse, and MacLaine are funny but in a direct way. They're giddy with youth. The other characters are one dimensional. The two most interesting characters are Paul Ford as Horace Vandergelder, who would be a Master of the Universe if the universe were limited to Yonkers in 1884, and Booth as the manipulative and sneaky, but very wise, middle-aged woman who holds the play together. "Mister Vandegelder is always saying that everyone is a fool," she muses to the camera, "but he's a fool too, so the choice becomes -- a fool with others or a fool alone." One of the many aphorisms. The movie ends with the principals reciting the lessons they've learned from the day's adventure.
Wilder was a writer of considerable range and often his comedy, like this farce, towed along in its wake a genuine moral, though more shadowy than the ones shouted out by the actors. This is a criticism of the Protestant Ethic and an endorsement of what used to be called existentialism. The Calvinist version of the Protestant Ethic was abroad in the land during the age of the robber barons, of whom Vandegelder is a minor example. An historic example is the father of Lizzie Borden. You know him -- "Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her father forty whacks"? The last public act Andrew Borden is known to have performed, while strolling through his factory and heading home, was to stoop down and pick up a padlock lying on the floor. There was no key for it. He examined it for a minute, turning it over in his hands, wondering if he might some day find a use for it, then slipped it into his pocket. Waste not, want not. That's what Horace Vandegelder would have done.
Now I'm about to run out of space so I won't have room to tell you all about how "The Matchmaker" is an endorsement of existentialism or how it links up with Arthur Schopenhauer's argument that we need to shed our inhibitions and follow our instincts. I was going to shoe horn Joseph Campbell in there too -- "Follow your bliss" and all that. I apologize for using so much space on the movie. I apologize abjectly. I grovel in mortification. I notice that all these apologies are taking up a lot of space too, and I'm sorry for that. I'll just have to conclude by recommending my forthcoming book: "Donald Duck and Schopenhauer: Laughter As Suicide."
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