Mixed Company

Year:	1974
Country:	USA
Language:	English
Genre:	Drama
IMDB:	IMDB Page
Rating:	4.0 Rate
Collection:	Seen It Wishlist
Community:	1 Has Seen


Director	Melville Shavelson
Selected Cast	Barbara Harris as Kathy
	Joseph Bologna as Pete
	Tom Bosley as Al
	Lisa Gerritsen as Liz
	Dorothy Shay as Marge
	Ruth McDevitt as Miss Bergquist
	Ariane Heller as Mary
	Stephen Honanie as Joe
	Haywood Nelson as Freddie
	Eric Olson as Rob

Comments and Reviews


Twistin 25th Jul 2015		Rated 4/10 Marketed as a cute, wacky, wholesome comedy about a Brady Bunch-style family with new mixed racial kids added to the household, Mixed Company should have been called Bad Company. On paper, it's a decent formula for reasonable success, and yet it completely failed to find an audience. Why? Mixed Company is missing a heart. Completely driven by chaos, mean spirits, foul-mouthed kids (who utter goddamn more times than I could keep count), and an array of characters that are impossible to love. Joseph Bologna is the head of the household and coach of the always losing Phoenix Suns basketball team, Barbara Harris is his wife and mother of three who also works for an adoption agency. After the decision to have another child is thwarted by their inability to conceive, they end up adopting a black boy. Ultimately they also take in a Vietnamese girl and Native American Indian boy. Rather than the usual racial gags and slapstick one might expect from this melting pot, the story turns to drama. And even though the script is careful to not fall prey to conventional feel-good platitudes, it replaces heavy-handed with mere heavy. A feel-bad comedy? Terrible idea, particularly with so little comedy. There's a side story about our coach locking horns with his star basketball player, and another bit featuring a somewhat racist neighbor (Happy Days' Tom Bosley); the latter situation is introduced and just abandoned. Neither the writing nor the direction is focused and the end result is a fumbled mess. That would explain why audiences stayed away during its theatrical run as well as on home video. Writer/director Melville Shavelson enjoyed modest success two years prior with the less angry The War Between Men and Women (also featuring Barbara Harris as the wife/mother), as well as the TV series that inspired it, My World and Welcome to It; both titles also feature Lisa Gerritsen, so he likes to stay in familiar company -- including storylines. He's best remembered for the runaway 1968 comedy, Yours, Mine and Ours, which really was the inspiration for The Brady Bunch. Small world. It's a hard-to-find movie and hardly worth the effort. 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?

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