Douglas Sirk's Weekend with Father (1951)

Whether in color or black-and-white, Sirk's forte is composition, and it can be argued that his flair for arranging actors and objects in space, balancing volumes, and distributing light and shadows comes through even more impressively without the help of color.
--Jean-Pierre Coursodon

"It has the Thoreau theme in it; it ties up with All That Heaven Allows .. I can't remember the picture too well any longer.  I think I did it only for the children."
--Douglas Sirk

Weekend with Father is in exquisite black-and-white, shot by journeyman cinematographer Clifford Stine. and written by journeyman writer Joseph Hoffman, writer of many B movies.  Some of the best directors of American films were immigrants, including Douglas Sirk, who had an impressive stage and film career in Germany and made some of the best films about America and all its contradictions in the forties and fifties.

Widower Van Heflin and widow Patricia Neal meet in Grand Central Station as they send their children off to camp (Heflin has two girls, Neal two boys) and then hit if off afterwards at the zoo, as wild as it gets in New York, except perhaps for Central Park, which is where Heflin earned his eagle scout badge. Heflin and Neal decide to get married and make a trip to the kids' camp for a weekend to give them the news, which causes lots of problems:  Neal is pursued by rugged camp counselor Richard Denning; Heflin is followed to the camp by Virginia Field, a glamorous TV star who is unaware of Neal, and of course Heflin's girls and Neal's boys do not get along, with the girls preferring Field to Neal and the boys preferring Denning to Heflin.  It all works out in the end but there are many amusing moments along the way, though of course humor is always subjective and whether one finds Weekend with Father funny is secondary to its beauty and its insight into the human emotions of love and jealousy as well as the complex relationships between parents and children, all constant themes in Sirk's work, along with the tension between nature and "civilization," as Sirk places the four adults and the four children in different groups in different shots to explore all the conflicts and possibilities.