The Matchmaker (1958 film)
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The Matchmaker is a 1958 film, with a screenplay by John Michael Hayes based on Thornton Wilder's 1955 play, directed by Joseph Anthony and starring Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine, Paul Ford, and Robert Morse.
Wilder's play had had a long and colorful history before making it to the screen. John Oxenford's 1835 A Day Well Spent, a one-act British farce, had been extended into a full-length play entitled Einen Jux will er sich machen by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy in 1842. In 1938, Wilder adapted Nestroy's farce into an Americanized comedy entitled The Merchant of Yonkers, which attracted the attention of German director Max Reinhardt, who mounted a Broadway production. It was a dismal failure, running for a mere 39 performances.
Fifteen years later, director Tyrone Guthrie expressed interested in a new production of the play, which Wilder extensively rewrote and rechristened The Matchmaker. The most significant change was the addition of the character Dolly Gallaher Levi, a widow who brokers marriages and other transactions in Yonkers, New York at the turn of the 20th Century. She sets her sights on local merchant Horace Vandergelder, who has hired her to find him a wife. After a series of slapstick situations involving mistaken identities, secret rendezvous behind carefully-placed screens, separated lovers, and a trip to night court, everyone finds himself paired with a perfect match.
The Matchmaker served as the inspiration for the hit 1964 Jerry Herman musical hit Hello, Dolly!.
