Boy on a Dolphin (1957)

User Rating:

5.9/10   

Director:

Jean Negulesco

Writers:

David Divine (novel)
Ivan Moffat (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

19 April 1957 (West Germany)

Genre:

Adventure | Romance

Tagline:

An adventurous love story that will live 'til the seas run dry!

Plot:

Sophia Loren stars as Phaedra, a poor sponge diver on the lovely Greek isle of Hydra. While diving,...

Plot Keywords:

Art Collector | Anthropologist | Diver | Greece | Blood

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar.

Cast

Alan Ladd	...	Dr. James 'Jim' Calder
Clifton Webb	...	Victor Parmalee
Sophia Loren	...	Phaedra
Alex Minotis	...	Milidias Nadapoulos - the government man
Jorge Mistral	...	Rhif
Laurence Naismith	...	Dr. Hawkins
Piero Giagnoni	...	Niko
Gertrude Flynn	...	Miss Dill

Runtime:

111 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Greek

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

4-Track Stereo (Westrex Recording System) (magnetic prints) | Mono (optical prints)

Certification:

UK:U | France:U | Finland:S | Sweden:Btl | Argentina:Atp

Filming Locations:

Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Trivia:

While filming Boy on a Dolphin (1957), Sophia Loren was required to walk in a trench in order to give audiences the impression that her diminutive co-star, Alan Ladd, was taller than she.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Mousiki vradya: Tragoudia apo ton Elliniko kinimatografo" (1976)

Soundtrack:

Boy on a Dolphin

The Boy Whom The Gods Have Enchanted

This film was made two years before I was born, but as a baby, my parents took me to where it takes place.It is not quite a cinematic cliche about Greece, because the presence of Sophia rescues it...It is interesting however that very few Greeks were in the main cast and that possibly had the War ended differently, the Alan Ladd archaeologist character may have been a German. Notice one last type who has since been copied in Greek island dramas-the Doctor Hawkins inebriate expatriate Englishman who removes the nail .

My greatest affection is for the theme music-It was based upon traditional music and I think we were privileged to hear Sophia Loren sing in Greek. The Greek lyric doesn't say much about boys at the bottom of the sea, but asks "What is this thing called Love ?" and of course, despite the velvet tone of the opening English (Was it Julie London ?) the rhyme is unbearable as some of Alan Ladd's pseudo-academic observations.

"They say he's only a statue And what can a statue achieve But while I'm gazing a t y o u "(!!)

And this was a verse which began incredibly mystically

"If the Boy whom the Gods have enchanted Should arise from The Sea"

I think the song lyric in many ways resembles the film-pointlessness for a not too marvellous artefact moving with the divine Aphroditic modern classicism of a woman whom the Gods have enchanted.

The story does not quite go anywhere, but the sights, sounds and the sea probably do.

It's a film that others have clearly learned from.I don't think it would stand a remake.Nationalists were taken in that the Boy was to be identified with Greece, but that is a very surprising reading of an innocuous story and may we perhaps to such swing the jockey boy,as is so hilariously done in this picture, despite all those museum signs "Do not Touch" And Clifton Webb's face ?