Over the course of the 1950s, Quine was offered increasingly prestigious projects at Columbia. Under producer Fred Kohlmar, he was assigned to direct The Solid Gold Cadillac, an adaptation of the hit Broadway play and a star vehicle for Judy Holliday, cast as a lowly shareholder whose common sense derails a nefarious corporation’s stockholder meetings. While the play is obviously a satiric fairy tale on the ability of the “little guys” to outwit corporate bigwigs, the heart of Quine’s film is clearly with the two lovelorn couples that the plot intrigues to unite.

Author John Fante worked in Hollywood to support the writing of his novels, despite his low opinion of the studios as a creative environment. Quine however gained Fante’s trust and affection with this sensitive, seriocomic adaptation of the author’s semi-autobiographical book, about a young couple facing the birth of their first child. Though the film has earned a place in history as one of the most frank Hollywood depictions of pregnancy (a topic that the Production Code virtually required the studios to ignore), today Full of Life is most noteworthy for the gentle pleasures of its depictions of the joys and discontents of family life, and for the rare opportunity it affords Judy Holliday to step outside the persona of the “dumb blonde.”