mjabrough Reviews

Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951)

Funny and touching

[9/10 · 6 October 2010]

Whilst not having the sudden shock of his appearance as a male "maid" and babysitter in "Sitting Pretty", this third Belvedere film lets Clifton Webb loose on both our laughing equipment and our heartstrings quite wonderfully.

The Belvedere movies are not conceived in the same way, which is refreshing. This one has all the hubris and conceit we take merrily on board from Webb, channelled alarmingly into something like a messianic mission to an old folk's home. Reference to the character's history in "Sitting Pretty" is made at one point, just as it is in "Mr Belvedere goes to College" so the effect is of Clifton Webb popping up randomly on screen like a mushroom under a damp tree - indeed he is first seen silhouetted from behind on a park bench in this film. One wonders how Belvedere floated along, spore-like, from one movie to the next - what did he do in the meantime? Zero Mostel lends very endearing support but must bow to Webb's leading role and, of course, the elderly character actors are all entertainingly and effortlessly used to best effect.

Touching and funny in a (thirdly) different way from the other Belvederes.

Sitting Pretty (1948)

Unconventionally conventional !!

[10/10 · 5 October 2010]

This is really a very funny movie indeed.

It is conventional in that the setting is an aptly-named picture-box small, white-painted, though gossipy, town, full of middle ranking executives and professionals bringing up their families and providing competently for their spouses (well, wives, really). Unconventional in that absolutely the most extraordinary character suddenly implants himself into the situation with immediate and transforming effect. Something like this happens in reverse when Sheridan Whiteside lands the wrong way up on the doorstep of Mr and Mrs Ernest Stanley in "The Man who came to Dinner". The direction wisely delays the principal character's entry for some time and it takes at least some nerve to do this but it works brilliantly here.

Clifton Webb manages to be both seriously comic and comically serious at the same time and there is genius in that ability. It is entirely credible that the quite sparky children rapidly take to Lynn Belvedere, no matter how often they are reproved by him.

Other reviewers have set out the story well enough that it need not be rehashed here, but what stands out in Clifton Webb's brilliantly iconoclastic performance (I mean that the class of personages known usually as babysitters does, apparently, contain a subset marked "other") is the way in which he simply makes himself fit in, not only to Robert Young's noisy family, but into this movie itself in an artistic sense. Webb's character is more than outrageous, but not for a moment do the other characters in the film, nor we, actually draw the line and (r)eject him. It's a great achievement, indeed.

He does have the able assistance of the British actor Richard Haydn, as the snoopy adenoidal neighbour, who is also tremendously entertaining on screen, both vocally and with several excellent visual gags at the ready. Haydn and Webb do use the movie to prove that the screen is too small for the both of 'em and the rest of the cast thus bounce off them gleefully whenever either or both are playing a scene.

The Mr Belvedere character was subtly used in two sequels to "Sitting Pretty" which both explore its creative and dramatic valency in quite satisfyingly different ways.

Nothing wrong with "Sitting Pretty" at all, and everything right: one is left on something of a high for several days.

Tampico (1944)

Watchable Robinson yarn

[8/10 · 1 October 2010]

Robinson easily holds our attention as Captain Bart Manson whose merchantman's whereabouts are betrayed by - whom? A combination of sea-adventure, spy-thriller and naive romance in which both the main performances and especially the photography are surely excellent and the action sequences sufficiently arresting not to tarnish the finish of the film as a whole. The central performance does not stretch (if "stretch" is the right word - he's never really over-stretched, is he?) Robinson as far as his Wolf Larson does (psychotically afloat in "The Sea-Wolf") but that really should not deter anyone from fully enjoying "Tampico", which has an excellent noirish atmosphere, particularly in the scenes set amongst colonnades and dark doorways in the last twenty minutes of the movie. Among the supporting roles, there is no weak or irritating contribution to spoil the force of the picture. Lynn Bari, in particular, is more than interesting in her work in this film, (the question of who her character really is and where she came from drives the plot; the audience must form its own opinion...)

There are awkward moments in the directing, it has to be said, particularly earlier on, where the plot moves rather elliptically forward, but this is too small a criticism significantly to spoil the film.