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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 all stock footage—the leads actually get to the famous places, including the historic balcony long before Amanda Seyfried does in Letters to Juliet. There are innumerable opportunities for some really mockster moments—let’s give Angie Dickinson a very belated high-five she deserves for splashing through her part as conniving glam-sham artist 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?) Yet Daves blows other chances to satisfy our hunger for tasty trash complications, particularly when Troy’s confidant Rossano Brazzi gets a second chance to woo a ready 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 himbos more vacant a sex symbol than dystrophic-legged Troy; you wonder what Suzanne, a bit flabby-assed in bathrobe, was on when she ended up marrying him in real life. (The marriage lasted about eight months; she’d revisit Rome later in another getaway If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium looking pretty, slim and seasoned.) Featuring Emilio Pericoli singing “Al-di-là,” one of 1962’s biggest hit songs, still a tourist anthem in Italy and with the kind of vocal affectation a lot of baby boomers karaoke at parties. Hornist Al Hirt’s cringy cameo starts with his opening line “You’ve had enough bubbly, Bubbles” and segues to an instrumental of “Al-di-là” to then beating up an eggoned sleazer. The beginning sequence features everyone’s favorite frau Norma Varden as principal of Briarcroft school, none too pleased that soon-to-be departing librarian Suzanne lended to a virgin student a copy of an assumed verboten sexy read—Irving Fineman’s Lovers Must Learn, the 1932 novel from which the movie is adapted but banned at the school library. Conveniently it’s stocked at Constance’s bookshop. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER (Revised 2010) All Rights Reserved.
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