Oh Dad, Poor Dad

All the Way Home will move many an audience to tears, but mostly for the wrong reasons. A watered-up treatment of the Tad Mosel play adapted for Broadway from the late James Agee's A Death in the Family, it pictures the laying to rest of Jay Follet, a young husband and father whose sudden death in an automobile accident teaches his family that the ties that bind are a tangled skein. Producer David Susskind and associates made the story a straightforward tearjerker--and left out the subtle, uncannily sensitive heart of it.

In a bittersweet reminiscence that prefaces his autobiographical novel, Agee wrote: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." Thus the tone is set for a love poem embracing five generations of Follets, seen circa 1915 through the lens-sharp perceptions of Jay's son Rufus. There are moments when the film seems about to capture this elusive poetic mood: Jay and Rufus at the picture show laughing at Charlie Chaplin, then moseying home after dark; a visit to Rufus' great-great-grandmother, edentate, gibbering, gaunt, propped up in her wheelchair like a gnarled old angel of death; Rufus amidst mystifying adult rituals at the funeral parlor where he goes to see his father. But too often a good beginning comes to naught. Scenes shot with a camera placed no more than knee-high to a grasshopper can supply kidsight without insight, and Michael Kearney, the eight-year-old newcomer cast and ineptly directed as Rufus, wears a grave, pinched expression that suggests little beyond the possibility that he has a loose tooth.

The boy's parents, of course, have real problems: they don't quite see eye-to-eye about sex, religion or alcohol.

Brassily playing Jay is Robert (The Music Man) Preston as a man so full of the juice of life that Wife Jean Simmons can't decide whether the love she feels for him is sacred or profane. When "God takes him away," Actress Simmons, facing widowhood and the birth of another child, capably brings off several scenes of throat-filling pathos. Helping her along is the family --here presented as a gallery of bloodless tintypes except for Aline MacMahon, repeating her stage portrayal of Aunt Hannah, and Pat Hingle as Jay's bumptious undertaker brother, whose hands reek of formaldehyde. Finally, Mamma tells Rufus that his father isn't really gone, after all, because, well . . . feel the baby?

In earnest of good intentions, the producers sent a location unit to Tennessee, and exteriors for the movie were filmed at Agee's boyhood haunts in and around Knoxville. They look fine. The Agee home was soon to be razed, so its back porch was salvaged for one sequence, and its furnishings were shipped East to lend authenticity to interior scenes. Trouble is, the author's durable patchwork of memories cannot be packed and crated, nor can intimations of every man's mortality be reduced to a broad hint that something is going to happen to Dad. Director Alex Segal has rendered a poignant minor classic in prosaic style, as if he were a nosy neighbor letting everybody in on the awful thing that happened to those nice folks down the street.

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