BEFORE: It's (M)Archie Madness, Day 4, and I think already I've determined that you could put Cary Grant in a movie opposite just about any woman, and he'll do quite well. Tonight it's Italian bombshell Sophia Loren, and tomorrow it will be Swedish Ingrid Bergman.
THE PLOT: A widower is trying to understand and raise three precocious children alone. He gets a little unexpected help from Cinzia, when the children decide she is be the new maid. She is actually an Italian socialite who is trying to get away from her overprotective father.
AFTER: There was a wave in 1950's and 60's television of parents with deceased spouses, in shows like "My Three Sons" and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", and this presented writers with the best of all possible writing scenarios. They could show a family and still explore the mysteries of dating, leading to more well-rounded characters who weren't stuck in the monotony of monogamy. In this film, a man who works for the state department returns home some time after his wife's death, to look after his children. Guess he didn't rush home for the funeral, so it seems that marriage was already on the rocks.
As he takes control of his family, he learns that the children are acting up (gee, I wonder why - they haven't seen their father since when, exactly?) and one's even a budding kleptomanic. The other son chooses to run away after an orchestra concert - which I understand, because my mother used to take me to see the Boston Symphony, and honestly I would have preferred to be anywhere else. But this leads to the boy following a beautiful Italian woman around for the night - can you blame him?
It's sort of another case of mistaken identity, similar to that seen in "Roman Holiday", as Loren pretends to be a commoner, but is really the daughter of a famous conductor. OK, so that's not the same as royalty, but apparently she's upper-class and travels around the world to various concert halls. Yet the only song she likes to sing is an annoying nonsense song that goes, "Bing Bang Bong", or something like that. Go figure.
Grant's situation, on the other hand, sort of reminds me of Audrey Hepburn's love triangle seen in "Love in the Afternoon", where she's got a steady boyfriend at music school, and has a lot in common with him, but she prefers the company of the American playboy who's way above her on the social scale. Here Cary Grant is seeing his wife's sister socially, and everyone (including them) just assumes that they'll get together, but then he realizes he'd rather be with the maid, who isn't really a maid and may actually be higher in society than himself.
I wish that a romance could somehow get into the nuts and bolts of it all, explain WHY someone in a love triangle prefers this person over that person - besides, of course, because one actress has top billing over another. Maybe it's something that can't always be quantified, but does that mean we should ignore the reasons entirely? Does it just come down to the fact that he's spent more time with Cinzia, so he's more familiar with her?
Life sort of imitated art here, as Grant and Loren were dating when they signed on to make this picture together, then she turned around and married Carlo Ponti during production. I bet that wasn't awkward at all.
NITPICK POINT: The kid playing harmonica appears to be some kind of virtuoso. When he plays along with the symphony orchestra, his music matches the orchestra's performance (Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4, aka "Italian Symphony"), though how would a small kid know that piece? And even if he knew it, which is doubtful, how would he know the orchestra would be playing that, and how would he be able to replicate it on the harmonica?
A while back, I figured out the secret of the harmonica when I saw John Popper of Blues Traveler wearing a vest with a bandolier's worth of harmonica - this meant that there were different harmonicas for each key, and therefore as long as you played the correctly tuned harmonica and everyone agreed on the song's key, it would be impossible to play an incorrect note on that harmonica. But how would the kid tonight know that the orchestra would be playing a piece in the key of A Major? Extremely doubtful.
Sometimes I just know too much about certain things, I think, and it prevents me from suspending my disbelief.
Speaking of which, there's an awful lot of rear projection in this film (or a lot of awful rear projection, whichever) and that doesn't help it seem believable, either. At one point they cut from a long shot of Grant's characters with his kids in front of a lake, and then when they cut to the close-up, it's clearly a rear projection of the lake scene. Why didn't they just film the close-up at the same lake right after the long shot? Maybe the close-up was a pick-up shot, made months later and they couldn't duplicate the original scene, but still - why not just re-shoot the whole scene if you've got everyone there?
Also starring Sophia Loren (last seen in "Nine"), Martha Hyer, Harry Guardino, Murray Hamilton, Eduardo Ciannelli, Werner Klemperer.
RATING: 4 out of 10 fishing poles
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