Movies from the Heart—Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry

This is another small film about a romance between two older people. And like all such films, it has to have a focus, a twist that makes it a film that people will want to see. This one had the inimitable Katharine Hepburn starring in it, and you can understand why. When this film was made in 1986, Hepburn was in her 80s—and she certainly wasn’t being offered parts to play, especially romantic parts! So this script was a bit of a boon for her.

Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry [1986] by James Prideaux, tells a simple story about an older woman, Margaret, who falls in love with her doctor Marvin. But there’s one hitch—oh, not as far as they’re concerned, but as far as their children are concerned—he’s Jewish and she’s a total WASP.

Take a look at a scene from early in the film.

This is where Margaret’s WASP family meets her intended—the Jewish doctor.

OK, at the time, this might have been cutting edge. But today? It looks SO incredibly dated. What was a big deal at the time seems like almost nothing today. And it seems that way because, I’m sorry to say, of some of the writing.

The arguments the Jewish family members put forth seem completely unreal—they just don’t sound like what actual Jewish people would say! And, alas, the same for the WASP side of the family—they are SO stereotypically prejudiced that they seem like caricatures of a family of WASPs, not actual people.

I have no idea if the writer was from a WASP background, a Jewish background, a little bit of both, or something else entirely. But the dialogue from both sides of this bickering family just didn’t always ring true.

So what do you do when you get a writing assignment to do a script and the characters you’re supposed to be writing are outside your level of competence?

You get competent.

You research these characters by going out into the world and interacting with people of the same race/nationality/ethnicity as the characters you’re writing about. You can’t put words into the mouths of characters whom you don’t fully comprehend!

This is work, for sure—but this is what a writer does! You get so familiar with the world you’re going to write about that when you sit down at the computer it just falls onto the page—and with all the right actions and accents and backgrounds that these characters bring to their world.

Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry is worth seeing for Hepburn’s performance, but not much more. You don’t want people saying that about your film—you want people to be engaged by every character, every line, every situation.

And that takes work.

Next week, our work continues as we look at the final film in our romantic films with older characters, Love Affair.

Copyright © Diane Lake

28Apr24

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