Liquid Laughter. A Gendered History of Milk & Alcohol Drinking in West-German and US Film Comedies of the 1950s — Page 7:
31 In Father of the Bride[8]Directed 1950 by Vincente Minnelli. The harassed Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) father of his beautiful daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) experiencing his only daughter's expensive wedding. He tells the story of the announcement of her engagement and all the ceremonial requirements and events leading up to the wedding over a period of three months. Stanley (Spencer Tracy) cannot sleep at night as he thinks about his daughter Kay's (Elizabeth Taylor) projected wedding. As he looks at a childhood picture of Kay showing her next to a horse, he starts to worry about losing his beloved daughter. The girl on the photo holds the rein of the horse, and we understand that he needs her as a foothold much more than she needs him. Stanley's wife Ellie (Joan Bennett) tries to calm him down by offering him a glass of warm milk. But it is not her milk he wants to drink; he cannot regress with her. He can merely dump his fears on her to find some sleep again. But in his subsequent dream the angst returns as a nightmare of Kay's wedding, which depicts how he loses control over the whole situation in church. He sinks into the carpet of the long aisle, becomes unable to walk anymore, pedals and crawls on all fours, until his clothes fall off and everything around him becomes vast. The father again becomes a little naked baby — he regresses.
32 Stanley wakes up startled from this picture and totters down in the kitchen, to his surprise finding his daughter sitting there and drinking milk. She pours him a glass of milk and as they start talking, his fear leaves him and flows through the milk over to his daughter. Here the mise-en-scene places the milk bottle exactly between them, vertically parting the frame. As a border, the bottle divides as well as connects father and daughter. It stands for the liminal process of passing fluids and therewith for the psychic content going back and forth between both. While Stanley's condition gets increasingly solid, Kay's becomes more and more flowing. Taking on the theme of his dream, now it is her who fears not to be able to walk down the aisle of the church. Meanwhile her father can assure her his encouragement to lead her safely to the altar. At the end of this scene he is reterritorialized in the position of the father, while she is in the position of the helpless girl: his regression floated through the milk towards her.
33 In Father of the Bride — just like in the other comedies — the dysfunctional man gets "cured" by the female protagonist. Accordingly, she finds the way from her significant position in society back into the dominated order of the recently reconstructed man. Kay's walk down the aisle is no longer propelled by her very own desire, but organized as a classical patriarchal handing-over of the bride by her father. Milk is the symbolic medium for that exchange.
34 Alcohol plays a contrasting role. When Stanley and his wife Ellie drive to the parents of their future son-in-law Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor) for a first visit, Stanley's urge for a drink gets stronger with every minute and a quick stopover at a bar is prevented only by Ellie. After they have arrived, however, Buckley's father offers drinks, and Stanley gets more and more drunk. He talks endlessly about Kay's life from its very beginning. His attempt to keep hold of his daughter by telling her entire life story appears funny. The more he drinks, the more the object of his talk slips out of his narration and thus Stanley himself slips out of it. At the end, he dozes off on the couch of his hosts and totally deceives himself of the fact that he is going to lose his daughter to their son.
35 The fear of losing his daughter holds yet another meaning. On their way to the Dunstans' house Stanley blusters about their assumed lower class. He alleges that the Dunstans are trying to climb up the social ranks by uniting their son with his daughter. As they arrive, he has to admit that things run rather the other way around. Despite the fact that Buckley is a whole generation younger than Stanley, the vibrant fiancé already belongs to a higher class. It becomes clear that it is not the achievement of Stanley's work but rather the alliance of his daughter with Buckley's family that could enable Stanley's family to scale up economically. Kay's desirable femininity — not his labor — becomes the signifier of his class. For the moment Stanley flees this insight with the help of alcohol. Until his daughter re-establishes him in the already mentioned kitchen/milk scene — the turning point of the plot — he remains helpless. Only then does he find the strength to detach from his daughter and to act according to the symbolic order.