Add sumptuous sets, expensive clothes and beautiful people and you have beautiful images. If those sets are luxurious London mansions, the clothes are ball gowns for the season, and the pretty faces are those of Sandra Dee and John Saxon, things promise to be unbearably overdone and cheesy.
The theme is one of those alarming assumptions of sophistication full of lively and supposedly witty characters, full of money, extravagance and malice; third-rate stuff meant to be a routinized version of the kind of second-rate comedies Noel Coward was making 30 years before. The result is a reactionary classism even in the 50s, overflowing with clichés in its hour and a half duration.
If the director is Vincent Minnelli the result can be expected to be somewhat less cheesy, and the images really nice and elegant. It is not the case, he is so delighted in that world where ugliness is a crime and poverty, if it existed, would be tactless, the images are so rosy and the treatment is so syrupy, there is so little detachment and criticism, it causes at least a blush.
Kay Kendall and Angela Lansbury are amusing, despite the hackneyedness of their characters (a pair of harpies who want to hunt the best match for their respective daughters). But Kay Kendall seems to know all too well what is expected of her, and she exaggerates even her over-the-top persona. Naturally the husband puts in some down to earth common sense, and since it also has to be fun, we got him drunk a few times. The youngsters: there is an aristocratic but ugly and boring one, who ends up showing himself to be an insatiable stalker; but of course Sandra Dee falls in love with the young drummer, handsome and intelligent, although with a not very recommendable reputation, who apparently has no money, but there is no doubt has a lot of class...in the end we know that he is also an aristocrat. Sandra Dee is supposed to be everything that the film can demand from a young American girl with high-class English blood in her veins: young, pretty, with airs of modernity, independent and without prejudice. The truth is that she is as unbearable as her beau.
Vincente Minelli made a couple of great masterpieces, several good movies, and a few clunkers like this. The result is of an unbearable mannerism. After watching this movie you will avoid Marble Arch.
The theme is one of those alarming assumptions of sophistication full of lively and supposedly witty characters, full of money, extravagance and malice; third-rate stuff meant to be a routinized version of the kind of second-rate comedies Noel Coward was making 30 years before. The result is a reactionary classism even in the 50s, overflowing with clichés in its hour and a half duration.
If the director is Vincent Minnelli the result can be expected to be somewhat less cheesy, and the images really nice and elegant. It is not the case, he is so delighted in that world where ugliness is a crime and poverty, if it existed, would be tactless, the images are so rosy and the treatment is so syrupy, there is so little detachment and criticism, it causes at least a blush.
Kay Kendall and Angela Lansbury are amusing, despite the hackneyedness of their characters (a pair of harpies who want to hunt the best match for their respective daughters). But Kay Kendall seems to know all too well what is expected of her, and she exaggerates even her over-the-top persona. Naturally the husband puts in some down to earth common sense, and since it also has to be fun, we got him drunk a few times. The youngsters: there is an aristocratic but ugly and boring one, who ends up showing himself to be an insatiable stalker; but of course Sandra Dee falls in love with the young drummer, handsome and intelligent, although with a not very recommendable reputation, who apparently has no money, but there is no doubt has a lot of class...in the end we know that he is also an aristocrat. Sandra Dee is supposed to be everything that the film can demand from a young American girl with high-class English blood in her veins: young, pretty, with airs of modernity, independent and without prejudice. The truth is that she is as unbearable as her beau.
Vincente Minelli made a couple of great masterpieces, several good movies, and a few clunkers like this. The result is of an unbearable mannerism. After watching this movie you will avoid Marble Arch.