|
CAMP TRAVELS Delmer Daves’ Rome Adventure is borderline camp featuring Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue gallivanting around the eternal city and its environs. Commendably TWA Getaway, the movie’s scenery isn’t faked or packed with stock footage—the leads actually get to the famous balcony long before Amanda Seyfried does in Letters to Juliet. There are innumerable opportunities for some really high mockster moments—let’s give Angie Dickinson the very belated credit she deserves for splashing through her part in amusingly gauche digs complete with built-in music, paintings on the boudoir headboard and doors, and a super-atrocious mirror. (Who gets most of the shame blame—art director Leo K. Kuter or set decorator John P. Austin?) But Daves blows many other chances to satisfy our hunger for tasty trash complications, particularly when Troy’s confidant Rossano Brazzi shows up to woo Suzanne. We really do need much more of Constance Ford, in one of her rare friendly roles as a bookstore owner who doesn’t seem to mind her new hire rarely works; she gets a great dog as compensation. Few blond male bimbos more vacant a sex symbol than dystrophic-legged Troy, whose most revealing moments on screen are in 1959’s Imitation of Life, in which he beats up Susan Kohner for trying to pass herself off as white. You wonder what Suzanne, embarrassingly flabby-assed in bath robe, was on when she ended up marrying him in real life. (The marriage lasted about eight months, and she’d revisit Rome later in If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium looking very pretty and slim.) Featuring Emilio Pericoli’s “Al-di-là,” one of 1962’s biggest hit songs, still a tourist anthem in Italy and the kind of affectation a lot of baby boomers karaoke at parties. The beginning sequence features everyone’s favorite frau Norma Varden, none too pleased over soon-to-be departing school librarian Suzanne having pushed a verboten sexy read onto a student—Irving Fineman’s Lovers Must Learn, the novel from which the movie is adapted. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER (Revised 2010) All Rights Reserved.
|