Jessica, la fascinadora

Jessica is an American lady (Angie Dickenson) who has inexplicably come to a small Italian town to be their midwife. What is a super-hot American doing there?! And what is the town to do? All the men spend all their time lusting after her and the women spend all their time complaining that their men are lusting after sweet Jessica. The town priest (inexplicably played by the French actor, Maurice Chevalier) tries to get everyone to accept Jessica--but it looks like it's an impossible task.

"Jessica" is a comedy that never really hits the mark--and its script clearly could have used a lot more work before it was filmed. As a comedy, it was supposed to be funny but it wasn't. Sadly, it was just pretty dull and it isn't particularly charming. As a result, the film just drags despite nice scenery.

This sex comedy from 1962 isn't entirely without its charms, but some of the content is objectionable (even considering the period), and it gets awfully muddled and dull in its second half. On the positive side, there's Angie Dickinson puttering around on her Vespa on the windy mountain roads overlooking the sea in the gorgeous town of Forza d'Agrò, which was also one of the locations used in The Godfather. Sentimentally, I liked seeing 74-year-old Maurice Chevalier sing a couple of tunes, even if the degree to which is character, a priest, is involved in the sex lives of the villagers seemed a little odd. All the ogling of Dickinson early on gets a little wearisome, mostly because it just seems unimaginative, but the candor with which everyone talks about the libido of both sexes and how the wives decide to take a page out of Aristophanes and go on a sex strike made me smile.

On the downside, the film takes attitudes that haven't aged well, which in itself isn't surprising and something I'd normally try to accept and learn from, but it crossed a line with the spousal abuse humor. The men have a right to expect sex from their wives, you see, and so when they hold out, they can be knocked around, and some of them appearing with garish black eyes the following morning. One of the jokes is that the husband also has a black eye, but I found no solace in that. This was part of acceptable humor of the period, e.g. Jackie Gleason regularly threatening to sock Audrey Meadows in the kisser six years earlier on the TV show 'The Honeymooners,' but when it's clear punching actually has occurred and no big deal, it's tough to enjoy.

To some extent I probably would have excused the film for those moments, but it also goes downhill when it starts trying to maneuver Dickinson's character into a romance with a character played by Gabriele Ferzetti. I found the scenes between them bland and uninteresting, taking away from Dickinson's flirtation with the villagers or the dynamic with the wives, one of whom is played by Sylva Koscina, who is unfortunately underused. As it plays out, all of the bite and playfulness is sucked out of the film, leading to a rather humdrum ending.

The basic plot line is that Jessica (Angie Dickinson), who is new in a small Italian village, and is working as a midwife, frightens the town's women. They fear she will steal their husbands, as she is presented as being amazingly alluring to all the men. The main problem with this premise, at least from a man's point of view, is that Silva Koscina, who plays one of the wives, is far more attractive, both facially and overall physically, than Angie Dickinson. (Perhaps the Italian men were mesmerized by Ms. Dickinson's blonde hair.) The women are presented as getting together and planning to deny their husbands sex, in order to prevent pregnancies and therefore drive the midwife out of town. The plots of comedies are expected to be kind of dumb, but this one really takes the cake: they deny both their husbands and themselves any sex, because they are jealous of a new woman? How many women do you know who would react that way? Three stars out of ten, and while I'm at it, Maurice Chevalier really can't sing, can he?

Maurice Chevalier and agnes moorerhead were predictably terrible ...silva koscina carried her own weight but the rest of the cast was boring BORING boring ... the morale is you cannot put a beautiful american woman in an italian community without the women there getting upset because all their loser men go lusting after a blonde with nice curves

Curvaceous young nurse from America--widowed on her wedding day and possibly still a virgin--is causing male hormones to race and females tempers to burn in a Sicilian village where she's the new midwife. Flora Sandstrom's novel "The Midwife of Pont Clery" becomes tepid showcase for star Angie Dickinson, who looks great riding around town on her Vespa but otherwise doesn't have much pizazz (the film's tagline calls her 'dynamite', yet Dickinson is so polite and low-keyed this is hardly the case). The women rebel against the sexy outsider by withholding lovemaking from their husbands, which might be an understandable reaction if leggy Jessica actually posed a threat to anybody. As it is, the girl is as innocent of her charms as the husbands are guilty of their ogling--though the picture does get a boost when Dickinson decides to fight back and be a flirt. Not to worry, she's already caught the eye of the wealthy, handsome marchese (himself a widower!), which leads to a limp and predictable conclusion. *1/2 from ****