ollywood has long had a thing for big families. The 1968 movie Yours, Mine and Ours saw Henry Fonda, a widowed father of 10, marry Lucille Ball, a widowed mother of eight. A year later The Brady Bunch debuted on TV, several years before Eight is Enough introduced us to the bustling Bradford family. Since then, screen families have been more conventionally sized, but now, along come Tom and Kate Baker (Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt) and their 12 children in Cheaper By the Dozen. This new movie is itself a very loose remake of the 1950 movie of the same name starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, which was based on the true story of the Gilbreth family, headed by Frank Gilbreth Sr., an efficiency expert and a pioneer in the field of motion study who often used his family as guinea pigs. In the new Cheaper By the Dozen, Martin plays Tom Baker, a coach of a college football team in small town Illinois. When he is offered his dream job - coaching a squad at a large university - the family is uprooted, much to the displeasure of all 12 children. When his wife has to go to New York on business, Tom is left alone to deal with the children's pent-up aggression. |
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