What's so important, Al?

Weddings and Babies 1958 U.S. (81 minutes) written, photographed, directed and produced by Morris Engel; music by Eddy Manson.

It’s a classic story.

Al Capetti (John Myhers), a photographer in his thirties, lives in his Greenwich Village storefront studio that advertises ‘Weddings and Babies’ and dreams of shooting more than the wedding and baby pictures that pay the bills.

The best argument challenging Al’s vision of a creative life and his splendid isolation is Bea (Viveca Lindfors), his Swedish girlfriend and assistant of three years, who is turning 30 years old. After helping Al shoot their one hundredth wedding together, Bea reminds Al that she is ready for the wedding and babies of their own that they have talked about.

Al has every intention of marrying Bea, really and truly. He tells her so. He wants to get married and go on the vacation she wants. He keeps telling Bea that they shall as soon as he has saved enough money because he does not want to spend his life shooting weddings and babies. And then he buys a $1400 movie camera…

In this tale of a couple teetering on the brink of marriage, Morris Engel’s movie camera finds the magic of small moments in midcentury New York City as Robert Doisneau’s still photography did in postwar Paris. Less known now but closer to home, photographer Ruth Orkin, Engel’s wife and collaborator in his two earlier films, The Little Fugitive (1953) and Lovers and Lollipops (1955), did similar work in New York.

Engel’s camera loves Lindfors and looks steadily at Myhers. Al’s proposal to Bea in silhouette in an entryway in Little Italy brings Doisneau to mind, no less than Engel's work with four-and-a-half-year-old Tony (identified in the credits only as ‘Chris’), the son of Al and Bea’s overbearing friend Ken (Leonard Elliott), and with Mamma Capetti (Chiarina Barile), Al’s elderly Old World mother.

Al loses patience trying to photograph the little boy who cannot sit still: Tony takes Al’s directions as part of a game they are playing. Mamma, preoccupied with preparing for her own death (Barile did not live to see the finished film), speaks little English; she seems to see the camera as an inanimate object, muttering to herself and looking at rather than into its watchful and sensitive eye.

Mamma’s odyssey around the city, from her retirement home to a Social Security bureau, to a grave memorial business in the old neighborhood and then to her husband’s gravesite, is memorable.

One of the charms of the film is that Engel’s frames are big enough to accommodate the young boy and the old woman, allowing non-actors to move naturally in the spaces he chooses as professional actors such as Myhers and Lindfors interact with them and with each other, trying to capture ordinary life as it looks, sounds and is lived.

John Myhers, Chiarina Barile and Viveca Lindfors in Morris Engel's Weddings and Babies

Engel also employs unconventional framing and tight focus effectively to convey awkward emotional space.

Most of the action takes place in Al’s studio or as he films the annual San Gennaro Festival along Mulberry Street in Little Italy, with trips to a Roman Catholic retirement home in the Bronx where he and Bea take Mamma, and to the large cemetery in Queens where Mamma plans to be buried next to her husband.

This film is the least tight of Engel’s three efforts in the 1950s. Long moments in which actors miscommunicate sometimes can seem overlong. Like the later work of John Cassavetes, on whom Engel is considered an important influence, this can feel like an attempt to show the false steps people make in failing to express themselves to each other, or saying things one wishes had not been said: all too common yet ordinarily stylized out of movie scripts.

Kino International issued this film on DVD in 2008 paired with Engel’s 1955 classic Lovers and Lollipops, two of three films Engel made in that decade.

            For those in the New York metropolitan area, from now through March 25 [2012] the Jewish Museum is featuring A Radical Camera, a large exhibition of the photographs of the Photo League (1936-1951) which includes the work of Engel and Orkin as well as many other New York photographers of the time.