Olympia

A lot of talent was wasted in this uninspired remake of 'His Glorious Night', based on a Molnar Play. The lovely Sophia Loren is beautiful to look at as a spirited Ruritanian princess falling in love with the stereotyped brash American industrialist. There are no new ideas here. Visually, it's appealing, but with all the talent involved, it should have been much better.

I like Sophia Loren so much that I actually enjoyed this rigid, superficial international production (headed by Ponti) that seems to be trying to emulate - very unwisely - Max Ophuls.

A central European princess has a flirtatious encounter with an American businessman (John Gavin) in a hunting lodge. Drugged on medication she kicks her pyjama bottoms off in the night and on waking, finds a love note from him - placed on said pyjamas - thus setting off the motions of the scanty plot in which Gavin pursues her to Vienna like a pigeon on heat while she and her mother try to ward off the scandal-mongering attentions of Angela Lansbury.

There's not much to it and it's a bit repetitive. Gavin is wooden as a spoon, Loren's mother is unpleasantly shrill, and everything is smothered in rococo - plentiful scenes seem to have actually been filmed in Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna.

Loren's elocution-lesson English is charming, though as always it seems to hamper her acting. Somehow Maurice Chevalier gets to slip in a song - I suppose there was no stopping him - but the banter between the old-word aristocrat and the progressive American is sometimes funny. Gavin asks what he should do with the cross he is awarded and is told: 'Wear it on state occasions'. Gavin says 'State occasions?' Really the film is an excuse to get Sophia and her natural pout into a number of lavish outfits to bosomy effect. That works.

I can't believe all the criticism of this film, it's a light ball of fluff, it's funny and fun, and Sophia is gorgeous and so is John Gavin who just died last month at age 86. Give it a break! It's not a masterpiece but it wasn't trying to be. Filmed on location in Italy and Austria the cinematography features a royal world gone by, and Sophia's character is a pip of a princess who makes everyone nervous because she keeps doing scandalous things like shooting at weather vanes and riding forbidden wild stallions and desiring romances with undesirables. Enter John Gavin an American who is good at heart and doesn't know she is a Princess at first, he thinks he hurt her by frightening her horse which threw her to the ground, so he takes her back to an inn to recover, only she's perfectly fine, she just loves the way he looks and is smitten. Then the real (royal) world comes back into play and she is called to be a responsible Princess again and possibly marry royalty but she just can't forget that handsome American who lives in Pittsburgh. :) Must say the clothes design in this movie was Oscar worthy, Sophia wears breathtakingly beautiful clothes, if you love the rich fashions of days gone by you should watch it with a keen eye toward its style. A nice film to drink hot cocoa to on a cold winter night.

Sophia Loren--in a succession of lavish gowns, her hair tinted a honey-brown--looks every inch the princess in this surface-pretty remake of 1929's "His Glorious Night", adapted from Molnar's play "Olimpia". An American businessman from Pittsburg travels overseas and falls in love with mercurial royalty from Ruritania; she has breached protocol by even being seen with this "peasant", so in order to keep him quiet she agrees to spend a weekend with him in the country. Wily Maurice Chevalier, as Sophia's father, gets to sing a little and make eyes at the ladies, and his polished comic timing is a welcome relief to the empty, useless bantering of the young lovers. As Loren's gallant guy, stiff John Gavin talks as if he's being dubbed by a ventriloquist (he has no music in his voice). Sophia doesn't have the witty lines of the older players (nor that of Angela Lansbury as a competitive Countess), though she gives more to this puff-piece than most actresses would have. A few funny lines do lighten the load, yet it's largely forgettable. ** from ****

As has been mentioned before, the sets, the scenery and the cast are beautiful, if mismatched. Sophia Loren is an actress I admire greatly, and one I think is underrated, having been cast in many roles for her looks, but this does her no favours. The story is lightweight, frothy and could have been fun, but the casting is wrong - as someone has mentioned before, she could hardly have been a child of her parents. The 'royals' are a conundrum - when is Hollywood going to learn that royalty don't behave like middle class hosts or hostesses - my shock at hearing Julie Andrews, as the queen in princess diaries say "I must go, I have a press conference, I can't keep them waiting" has never abated, the royals are above all that, and they certainly don't check tables or supplies when hosting a party. I think the casting was definitely a problem, a blend of so many nationalities in supposedly a European country, and while Princess Anne of Great Britain was a great horseman, I can't see it having been permitted when this film was supposedly based.(and the commentator was American?) That aside, the constant irritations of implausibilities and the bad, BAD scripts made this film mostly unwatchable. The American guy was OK (if forgettable), Sophia was OK, as were each of the cast individually,but what they had to deal with was desperate. It's a shame, this could have been highly enjoyable, as much fun as any lightweight film of that era. But someone was very lazy.