Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990) on Netflix
In 1930s and 1940s Kansas City, lawyer Walter Bridge holds to his conservative values as his children push for a modern life. His wife India keeps an optimistic view of the world.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb6.6/103,961 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Bridges are an upper-class family in Kansas City, Missouri. Walter Bridge is a lawyer who holds conservative values dear, and he and his wife India raise their children, Carolyn, Ruth and Douglas, in the Country Club District through the 1930s and 1940s, the years of the Second World War. Manners and expectations around the family keep shifting. The children want lives shaped by newer ideas, and their father resists what he reads as their rebellion. India Bridge works to keep an optimistic view of the world while her husband stays emotionally distant and her children's outlook is more modern than her own.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- With no money to rent set dressings, the production relied on donations: fabric and wallpaper firm Brunschwig & Fils gave $100,000 worth of materials, Glen Raven Mills of North Carolina gave period awning fabric, and Benjamin Moore gave 100 gallons of paint.
- Much of the film was shot out of sequence to save money: during a single morning filming Mr. Bridge's law office, the furniture and Paul Newman's makeup and clothes were changed every hour as scenes jumped from spring 1932 to autumn 1938, winter 1945 and summer 1938.
- Joanne Woodward read the first of Mr. Connell's novels when it was published in 1959 and spent years hoping to adapt it for television; she did not originally intend to play Mrs. Bridge because of the age difference, but by the late 1980s she took the part.
- Apart from one scene in Paris and another that used an Ottawa snowfall, the film was shot entirely in Kansas City, Missouri, on the same streets Connell traveled as a child and teenager, with no sound stages at all.
- Production designer David Gropman filled the Bridges' home with the Connell family's own belongings: Evan Connell's sister lent her porcelain, silver, Christmas ornaments and coffee urn, and a lamp Connell made as a boy sits in Douglas Bridge's bedroom.
- Costume designer Carol Ramsey had to borrow the whole wardrobe, including $4,000 of 1938 sashes, merit badges, handcarved neckerchief slides and Boy Scout pins for Douglas Bridge's Eagle Scout ceremony; London tailors Gieves & Hawkes made the male characters' wardrobe in exchange for a screen credit.
