L'Américaine et l'Amour

Call this MGM glossy a Metrocolor time capsule of 1961 when Southern California tract style suburban living was as popular as the Twist and fall out shelters.

The plot gives us Bob Hope as A.J. Niles, a bon vivant author who has been jet-setting around the world for the past ten years or so writing salacious best-sellers about the various sexual mores of men and women based on culture and environment. Due to tax problems, A.J. is summoned back home by his publisher, portrayed by the avuncular yet quirky John McGiver. A.J.'s next saucy expose is to take place in a cookie cutter suburban shangri-la of Southern California real estate for young marrieds called Paradise Village. Kids are optional and cute but not precocious.

'Bachelor' Bob glides through this relaxing opus, ably assisted by adrenalin raising Janis Paige,who practically steals the show as a truly desperate housewife.

Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton are again reunited on screen to add hot and bothered sparks to the otherwise tranquil setting of palm trees, manicured lawns and oh so colorful pastel interiors. In this context, Hope aptly refers to his living room as "early Disneyland."

Lana Turner portrays Bob Hope's love interest. Miss Turner is tailored in perfectly matching fashion and temperament to the laid-back Southern California motif, graceful and elegant as the on screen TWA Boeing 707 is to the cloudless blue skies. Unfortunately, this comparison also sums up the on screen chemistry between Lana and Bob.

Don Porter is cast as the glowering housing tract manager who is also eyeing Miss Turner and accuses A.J. Niles of being no less than a "libertine." This only adds to the author's appeal within the female population of this perpetual block party as they have already read the notorious A.J's previous global escapades.

Henry Mancini's sprightly, yet soothing theme provides a suitable backdrop to the warm, sun kissed environment replete with bright supermarkets. You can almost smell the fresh produce next to the pyramid stacked canned goods waiting for an accident to happen.

While BACHELOR IN PARADISE is not exactly a hotbed of sexual scandal in the suburbs, it does exude a relaxing comfort zone simmer for the viewer.

I watch this every time it's on cable, mainly because it is a graphic memento of "Camelot" - a time in America of sheer optimism and middle class power. This movie revels in the 60s suburban life style and the fact even the middle class was shrugging off stuffy Victorian sexuality. But within a setting of Bob Hope's dry humor, lots of hot 60s women, the BIG cars, the ranch style canyon subdivision houses - and the consumptive 60s lifestyle. Gotta love it on nostalgia value alone but as one of the better Hope 60s comedies, peppered with his slick double entendre one-liners bounced off a bevy of Hollywood hotties, it's a winner as well.

Long time ago I was surprised when I realized that the director of "Bachelor in Paradise", was the same person who made the masterpiece "The Incredible Shrinking Man", and the one behind cult classics as "It Came from Outer Space", "Creature from the Black Lagoon", and "Tarantula"; not to mention fillers as "Monster on the Campus", and hundreds of TV episodes from all kind of series, from "Dr. Kildare" to "The Love Boat". Arnold was not new to comedy: there are indeed comic elements on all the horror movies mentioned above, but moreover, a year before he started shooting this MGM glossy adaptation of a story by Vera Caspary (the same lady who wrote both "Laura", and "Les Girls"), director Jack Arnold --who I guess Andrew Sarris must have classified very low in his Olympus of filmmakers-- had a hit with the British comedy "The Mouse That Roared", with Peter Sellers playing different roles, including the Duchess of Fenwick, the senile ruler of the littlest country in Europe. It is a story of little people and little minds, treated with affection and a kind of humor far from what audiences laugh about today. "Bachelor in Paradise" is somehow in the same vein: it is a funny and affectionate view of how little minds react when confronted with different attitudes about sex, which --up until the days of the reign of the Hays film code-- was treated rather hypocritically in American cinema. Everybody was doing all type of positions and gender combinations, with all kinds of adornments, except "Hollywood creatures". For the early 1960s, though not as radical as it may sound, "Bachelor in Paradise" suggested sex was more fun than accepted in regular films, and this was its main attraction, not Bob Hope, Lana Turner, or the new coupling of Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton. Even I, who was 10 years old and lived in the city, far away from a suburb like Paradise, found it more daring than the comedies in which Doris Day played a virgin with tired facial tricks, as 1959's "Pillow Talk", which incredibly won the Best Screenplay Academy Award. I had not seen "Bachelor in Paradise" in decades... but when I did again I found it decidedly proto-Altmanesque, the kind of comedy that Robert Altman would have been doing in the early 1960s, probably with a more acerbic approach. Only the music industry had teased us with multiple releases of the music Henry Mancini composed for the movie. Now we can watch "Bachelor in Paradise" again, restored, in wide-screen and the flat color cinematography of those years (with few exceptions, everything was as bright and clear as the images in television sets). However it must be seen with a 1961 frame of mind. If you had not been born yet, do a little research. It does help a lot to appreciate a film about sexual life of the Americans without showing what they were doing in cars, bedrooms, and bushes, when the movie was made.

I don't know why I love this movie so much but I do. It's certainly no cinematic masterpiece, but if you're of a certain age it's an awfully pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

***FYI: Catch this one on Turner Classic Movies if you can, they air it in its correct wide-screen format.

I cannot imagine any other actor who could play A.J. Niles as effectively as Bob Hope. Mr. Niles, an internationally traveled author of Kensey-type books on the sex lives of the inhabitants of various European nations, finds himself confined to the United States as a condition of his quasi-probation for unintentional tax evasion that was actually committed by his now missing accountant. "I just can't believe that Herman Whoppinger is dishonest!" The plot line is amusing and clever, if predictable, but its predictability really only enforces the comforting effect this film will have on the average baby boomer who once lived in that clean fresh little white-bread world and misses it. Mr. Niles is then sent to 1961 suburbia by his manager to write a similar book about the sex lives of Middle America, and here he runs across real estate broker Rosemary Howard, played by impeccably groomed Lana Turner. Ms. Turner, easily one of the five most beautiful women of the American cinema, is still stunning at 40.

Once Rosemary puts A.J. into her gigantic airplane-shaped Plymouth and drives him into the real estate development of Paradise Village, the baby boomer viewer will be transported back to a much happier time in our history. With the exception of the mountainous terrain visible in the background, Paradise Village could be Anywhere USA. Those houses. Those stores. Those clothes! If your mom wore little white gloves and teetered around on pencil heels, you know what I'm talking about. You can almost smell the clean suburban night air, the flowers in the back yard, and the burgers cooking on a neighbor's grill, and you never want to leave.

Aside from this, the cast, including Paula Prentiss, Janis Paige, Virginia Grey, and the priceless Reta Shaw turn in a capable performance with a witty script packed with all the anticipated nudge'n'wink humor of the early sixties sexless bedroom comedies. Replete with the tired old saws of an over-sudsing washing machine, the judgmental neighborhood busybody, colossal misunderstandings, and people getting drunk and acting stupid, you will probably smile a good deal more than you'll laugh out loud, but the story still manages to put these ingredients into a somewhat original arrangement and there is enough genuine chemistry between Hope and Turner to keep you interested and concerned for the outcome of the characters.

Perhaps the best compliment I can give this pleasing film is that in our home, where we have enormous love and respect for old films, this one stands up to repeated viewings and gets watched over and over again. It's a delightful way to spend a rainy evening.

..........IN HEAVEN!!!

1961........Kennedy was in the White House, the word 'Vietnam' meant little (or nothing) to the average American, and Bob Hope was close to winding down his prolific (film) career. Just getting to soak in the memorable era this film represents would normally have been entertainment enough, but this flick goes the extra mile by offering a fun little ride with Bob Hope at the wheel, in fine comedic form.

Having just watched the Warner's Archive Collection Remastered Edition DVD, I can honestly say that I can't remember having had a better time watching a movie in many, many years.

Though "The Ghost Breakers" (1940) will always be my favorite Bob Hope film, this one comes close. The script is good, Hope is Hope, and the supporting cast offers a tantalizing bevy of 'Bob' beauties, both talented AND lovely (A young Paula Prentiss showing up in form-fitting, pink short-shorts, approximately 20 minutes in, is TRULY a sight to behold!).

If you get the chance, mix yourself a pitcher of 'Gibsons', pop this one in, and let the wondrous era that once was, and will never again be, wash over you like a light sun shower....