There's a Girl in My Soup

I like Peter Sellers, most of the time. I had never seen him portray an upper-class Brit until this movie. He pulls it off pretty well, although you see bits of Inspector Clouseau in the mix. It doesn't get interesting until Goldie Hawn arrives.

I never expected the youthful Hawn to deliver such a solid performance. Her timing was great and her expressions were priceless. The way she alternately shoots Sellers lecherous character down and seduces him is beautiful to watch. Verbal sparring like I've seldom seen from a movie of that era.

The last thirty minutes of the movie DOES fall flat. It is worth the let down just to see the first sixty. Hawn is nude for a few glorious seconds early on. Enjoy it...

"My GOD but you're lovely."

This is surely one of Sellers' most memorable characters. This guy HAS to have been a major influence on Austin Powers: he's an aging playboy, with hairy back and bad teeth, who never imagines that he's anything but irresistible to women. Goldie Hawn is the woman who won't give him what he wants when he wants it.

The first hour is pure gold, some of the greatest comedy i've ever seen. Then it strangely begins to meander. Really badly. With the extended wine tasting journey, involving many pointless shots of Frenchmen drinking wine at what seems like a real wine tasting ceremony, and later on the pointless shots of scenery, very out of place in this story. I was thinking what terrific characters they were, and what a terrific comedy set-up we had here - but at the point where it starts to wonder, you realise that they'd only thought up these funny characters - but hadn't got as far as what to do with them. Thus, they also had no idea what the resolution, if any, should be.

They seem to have figured that everything would work itself out once they started shooting - well, it didn't. The last half-hour is an absolute mess. I would have enjoyed it much more as a 60 minute movie, thankyou very much.

As it is, we have a clumsy "resolution" scene that needed about seven re-writes, and a rather meandering, almost unnecessary last half-hour, peppered with a few good scenes (Sellers carrying Hawn over his shoulder in the lift), which unfortunately spoils what might have been one of the funniest movies i've ever seen.

6/10. The first hour is an absolute gem - i'd still recommend you see it for that.

Dork that he was in real life, Peter Sellers plays the dork's idea of a English ladies man, a swinging bachelor just over 40 but using his money and notoriety as a TV food critic(!) to make time with beautiful girls. Against Goldi Hawn's 19-year-old, free-loving, introspective mod girl, he's just enough of a square to make him believable as well as pathetic.

After establishing his charm with a couple of lovelies, Sellers meets his match in Hawn, who turns out to like him for who he is (being American, she has no idea who he is). He rescues her from a juvenile relationship with a mod drummer, and they're off.

There are some great scenes between them as they work out their attraction with uncomfortable analysis. After some missteps over the attempted initial seduction and a wine-tasting trip to France, they settle into a charming relationship. But the news media misinterprets their getaway as a honeymoon, causing a bit of friction when they return to England, but it seems flat. The movie falls apart when Hawn's character makes an improbable decision (she seems to be kidding), but Sellers nearly saves it with a sympathetic performance.

The nonsensical ending and occasional out-of-place moments thruout make this one good but not great, provided you're interested in the late 60s-early 70s era.

I love the message in this film; that we don't need to conform to the norms of society to be happy. We don't need to search for life's purpose because there isn't one, we can just be ourselves.

This is a charming, beautifully made drama about an upper class man who thinks he might be envious of the lifestyle of those whom society hasn't moulded into what's expected. It's about a free-spirited girl who thinks she might be envious of being part of a world she finds stuffy and rather ridiculous. Both Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn are perfect as the aging Lothario from a bygone age and the wild child of the sixties.

The story of mismatched lovers from different sides of the tracks is as old as Shakespeare and was used in what seemed to be about half of all the pre-code pictures of the early thirties. The society of the 1970s, when remnants of 1930s mindsets still ran through what is virtually 'modern times' with modern attitudes created two distinct societies happily existing side by side. Sellers' and Hawn's characters get together and embark as tourists in each other's lives. They're both cynical enough to know that this is just a holiday romance but they want to believe that their relationship can really work. Deep down however they're both too selfish to completely jettison their own ways of living and means of finding personal happiness.

Were this a 1930s film it would have either had a cheesy happy ending or a melodramatic tragic tear-jerking shocking denouement. Without giving anything away, the conclusion of this is much more like real life - it just goes on. That's not unsatisfying in fact it has quite a surprisingly optimistic feel.

Maybe because Peter Sellers is known for comedy this is wrongly assumed to be a comedy. Clearly it's not a comedy but despite its cynicism, it is uplifting. It's an intelligent and thoughtful study of an impossible relationship. Peter Sellers was a surprisingly good actor (with a surprisingly hairy back) but most impressive is Goldie Hawn who seems like she'd been acting for decades (with a reassuringly non-hairy back)

In many respects Peter Sellers is satirising himself in There's A Girl In My Soup, by playing this role of an ageing Lothario in the public eye. As such, Sellers gives a first rate performance as would be expected from the great man. Deep down Seller's character in the film was a lonely, insecure celebrity with low self-esteem, who depended on the adulation of women, and his fans like a life support system. In this sense Seller's was portraying the tears of a clown via this characterisation of himself.

And while Sellers has charisma in this role, the film lacks it in the comedic genre it's supposed to be. There's allot more that I expected from Hawn, while the director could have made more of situations.

In some respects, it could be said that the restaurant scene in the film Pretty Woman (1990) is an extrapolation of that in There's A Girl In My Soup, where Seller's character takes Hawn's wine tasting, when she appears to know nothing about the etiquette of the rituals involved in it. The director could have exaggerated Hawn's character's clumsiness in this scene, like Julia Robert's when eating her meal in the restaurant scene in Pretty Woman.

Overall, a bit flat, but worth watching for Seller's alone.