[Originally published in Movietone News 24, July-August 1973]
Wedding in White begins in a cellar and, spiritually, stays there. Not a single vagrant ray of light is permitted to fall on the blighted existence of Jeannie, whose mushroom pallor is only one manifestation of the death-in-life she lives in a benighted house in a benighted Canadian town during World War II. In the role Carol Kane recalls one of those prematurely faded, utterly resigned children who would drift into one’s class in the middle of a school year, sit in silence, make no friends, fail at studies, and probably be gone before the year was out, trailing after a parent who couldn’t find a job. Jeannie has parents and the father has a job and they stay in a charmless, frighteningly permanent place, a self-perpetuating system unto themselves. Jim (Donald Pleasence) measures manhood solely in terms of uniforms worn, women swived, and bottles emptied; a veteran of the first war, he now mounts strutting guard at a local POW camp and spends most of the off-duty time we know about stumbling around in the company of an old crony. A son comes home on leave bringing a case of beer and a buddy of his own, who summarily rapes the daughter of the house and beats a hasty retreat in the morning. How she comes to be the target of opportunity and how her family and community handle the aftermath make for a kind of sociological horror film.