Last night I watched Houseboat, a 1958 film starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, and it was delish. Basically the louche premise is that a divorced father of three who is also a diplomat hires this Italian beauty who is the daughter of a conductor and kind of milling about looking for adventure, to be the maid/nanny on his houseboat in the country. My emphatic delight is best summed up with an excerpt of The New York Times review of the film when it was released:
First, it is in bad taste. The trumped-up pathos of motherless children and the aura of Miss Loren do not mix. Both are exaggerated in this elaborately synthetic film, but that's no warrant for making a tasteless mishmash of essentially clean sentiment and leering sex.
With Miss Loren slinking about the houseboat in various revealing states of décolletage, designed to catch the audience's attention, as well as Mr. Grant's, it is offensive to pretend to be interested in the emotional disturbances of kids.
In the second place, what has been concocted by the Messrs. Rose and Shavelson is extremely short on entertainment—and that's its more chargeable score. Its story of how a vagrant widower takes care of his insecure children by haphazardly hiring an Italian beauty who he thinks is a cheap domestic (or worse) is a silly piece of contrivance and its jokes and japes are poor. The whole thing, including the child psychology, is a matter of cheap artifice.
Obviously, highly recommended! 19 tacky gold stars.
From the LL Archives: Houseboat | Heaven.
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