Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

richard-1787 It is unintended irony, I suspect, that the plot of this movie - what little there is of it - centers around Bob Hunter's (Hope) efforts to find a script. This movie could certainly have used a better one. Hope and especially Fernandel were great comedians, but they have virtually nothing to work with here, so the movie drags from one uninteresting scene to the next.How a picture executive could have believed that anyone would pay money to see this, much less, after having seen it, tell anyone else to see it, I can't imagine. It really is one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time.

writers_reign To give you an idea of how bad this is the highlight is a rip-off from Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, an early (1938) Billy Wilder screenplay. In Bluebeard Edward Everett Horton is attempting to get into a mental hospital to visit Gary Cooper. Twice he knocks at the door; twice the door is opened and shut on him. He tries again. Knocks. The door is opened. He barks like a dog. Ah, come in, m'sieu. This time around Fenandel is trying to get in to see hope but what Wilder and Lubitsch accomplished in under sixty seconds is here parlayed into a few minutes. Trivia buffs are always going to want to check out Preston Sturges playing a French playwright modelled on Sacha Guitry - if Serge Vitry doesn't help you nothing will. Having bombed two years earlier with The Iron Petticoat - a sort of Ninotchka without the style - Hope, who takes credit for the 'idea' tried a similar format again with no better results: in this movie Martha Hyer falls for Hope and winds up with him; the following year she rejected SINATRA in Some Came Running. Nuff said. There are a couple of half-decent one-lines but one liner does not a movie make.

Steve Tarter Anita Ekberg's the highlight here in a comedy that needed a real villain for Hope and French clown Fernandel to play off. Instead we get a bunch of black-suited Keystone cops types who chase Hope around for the last half-hour of the picture. Lots of weak slapstick stuff in zis veddy zilly French movie.

philosophymom It should have been funnier.It had the right cast: Bob Hope in the sort of part he could believably play, that of clever, self-aware, ham entertainer "Bob Hunter"; Grace-Kelly-esque Martha Hyer as his classy, hard-to-get love interest "Ann McCall"; shapely Anita Ekberg as "Zara," a mysterious spy whose strange interest in Bob complicates (among other things) the hapless comedian's attempts at romancing Ann; and funny-faced Frenchman Fernandel as "Fernydel," Hunter's Gallic counterpart/rival/friend in the story's adventures.And the plot had potential. There was mystery (why does a spy ring seem determined to keep Bob Hunter from acquiring a script from a famous French playwright?), romance (as endearingly un-suave Hunter slowly wins his sophisticated lady), and comic relief (in the exchange of one-upmanship between friendly rivals Fernydel and Hunter). Throw in the classic cruise-ship setting which begins the film, plus several car (and other vehicle) chases through Paris and its environs at the film's climax, and you have a diverting hour and a half of film, right?Well, more or less. The film's comic potential is never *quite* realized, in large part because the scenes with real screwball potential simply move too slowly. Case in point: a courtroom scene in which non-Anglophone Fernydel is called to testify to Bob Hunter's sanity. The trial is conducted in English, and as the Frenchman "defends" his American friend by proudly trotting out all the "hep cat" slang the latter has taught him ("crazy," "out of this world," "the living end"), he only makes things worse. But the sort of snappy pace that gives that crucial edge to linguistic-confusion routines (think "Who's on first?") is utterly absent. And in another scene, in which the baddies chase Hope, Hyer, and Fernandel through an amusement park, it's just too dark to properly make out their antics.Still, the film served its purpose for me: I bought it to see the celebrated Fernandel in his only American movie role of which I am aware. Without English, the Frenchman could not have played many parts accessible to a mainstream American audience, and in this movie his role is perfectly designed to get around that difficulty. He essentially plays a broad caricature of himself, with the usual stereotype of the Frenchman-as-eternal-romantic thrown in for good measure.Oh, and there's a funny "in joke" for those who know a little bit about Fernandel. The role for which he is best remembered in Europe is that of "Don Camillo," the fiesty priest in a series of well-loved films based on Giovanni Guareschi's stories. And when, in "Paris Holiday," his character dons a cassock in an attempt to sneak into a place where Hope's being held prisoner, it's as if Don Camillo is making a brief cameo here.