The Member of the Wedding (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is a twelve-year-old girl named Frankie, poised between childhood and adolescence in an "empty, ugly house" somewhere in the Deep South. Here she lives out her dreams with two other lonely people: her solemn, bespectacled, six-year-old cousin and playmate, John Henry (Brandon de Wilde), and Berenice, the Negro cook (Ethel Waters). In her desire to "belong," the motherless Frankie romantically identifies herself with her about-to-be-married brother and his bride, and plans to accompany them on their honeymoon.
When she is rejected as a "member of...