Un couple pas ordinaire

Once again I'm guessing that Rock Hudson signed on to make this film because of the trip to Vienna and Rome he was getting. Those fringe benefits are important especially when you know this caper film is going to be a Thanksgiving special.

Rock and co-star Claudia Cardinale basically go through the motions with zero chemistry between them in A Fine Pair. Hudson did a pair of films in the Sixties with another Italian co-star Gina Lollobrigida and those two movies had a lot more going for them than this one. Hudson is ostensibly a police captain in New York who gets a visit in New York from the daughter of a colleague in Italy.

Claudia's a rebellious child coming from a law enforcement family she's become a thief. But ostensibly she's had a change of heart and now wants Rock's help to return some swag she robbed over in Vienna.

So Rock drops everything, career, marriage, etc., to go do a reverse caper in Vienna. Of course that's hardly all, but the film moved so slow I doubt you'll wait to find out.

A Fine Pair will never be in anyone's list of top Rock Hudson films.

"A Fine Pair" from 1968 is one big yawn of a caper film which stars Rock Hudson and Claudia Cardinale.

Rock plays NYPD Captain Mike Harmon. Esmeralda Marini, who knew him when she was a child in Italy, visits him. Her father was an Inspector, and Mike has precious memories of the six months he spent with the family. Esmeralda needs his help. She's a jewel thief who is reformed and wants to return some jewels to a prominent family before they arrive at their Kitzbuhel, Austria home. She wants Mike's help.

I'm going to stop right there. Mike Harmon has risen to the rank of Captain, but apparently brains had nothing to do with it since you can see the situation they get into coming from a mile away. As the story continues, it becomes more and more ridiculous. However, the convoluted plot, which consists of bringing a room temperature up to 134 degrees, gives male viewers a chance to see the incredible body of Cardinale when she strips down.

The two stars have no chemistry. I've always liked Rock Hudson, but he exhibits no personality here. Cardinale's character is not likable, though she did bring back memories of having that hairstyle.

Skip this.

This is a dreadful film. Rock Hudson speaks as if he were dubbed. Cardinale is unbearably kittenish and cutesy-poo as she deploys her three facial expressions and the "plot' is incomprehensible. Not one person acts as if she or he were a normal human being. It is hard not to lose the will to live after about half an hour of this tosh. The scenes of them behaving like idiots in Rome are straight out of the viagra school of advertising and one expects a voice over announcing that you should see a doctor if your boredom lasts for more than four hours. A forgettable score by Enrico Morrioni, an unbelievable script that seems to have been run through an automatic translation machine, two stars at the bottom of their game, direction, such as it is, that uses every cliché from caper films in seemingly random order--what's not to hate?

Despite the two prominent stars in its cast, "A Fine Pair" has never been released on home video, and is seldom broadcast on television. It doesn't take long upon watching it to figure out why it's been banished to obscurity. Though Hudson and Cardinale have shown talent and charm elsewhere, you wouldn't know it with this movie. Cardinale is downright annoying, and Hudson's obvious bored demeanor makes it clear he is wishing he was elsewhere. Needless to say, the scenes where the two are paired up - which make up most of the movie - generate absolutely no chemistry. But the problems with the movie go beyond the stars. The movie has an often cheap feel, from the tacky sets to the wretched dubbing. The biggest problem is that while it's a caper movie, it moves along at a deadly slow pace and generates no excitement or suspense. The only redeeming feature is the musical score by Ennio Morricone, though even fans of his will probably admit that this music is far from his best work.

Sometime in 1969, I saw trailers for a double bill coming to neighborhood theaters consisting of A FINE PAIR and CHARRO, a western starring Elvis Presley. I eventually saw CHARRO in a theater, but with a different co-feature, so I had to wait a few years before I caught up with A FINE PAIR on television. I watched it again recently because I had a hankering to hear its light, jaunty, melodic Ennio Morricone score again, a refreshing change of pace from the composer's heavier (but richer) score for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, which I re-watched a week ago and which, like A FINE PAIR, opened in New York in May 1969. Both starred Claudia Cardinale, but only A FINE PAIR uses the actress's actual voice in the English dubbing. This film is clearly not afraid of her accent.

I enjoyed A FINE PAIR. It's not the most intricate caper film I've ever seen, nor the most comprehensible. It could have used a more stylish director (think what Mario Bava, of DANGER: DIABOLIK fame, could have done with it). Still, I was quite smitten with Claudia's free-spirited character. She smiles a lot, is open and gregarious, and her joy is quite infectious. Rock Hudson plays a by-the-book police captain in horn-rimmed glasses and trenchcoat who gradually falls under her spell, changing his wardrobe and his manner (and his moral code) as he eventually goes along with her schemes. It's a very different style of performance for Mr. Hudson, who was working well outside the comfort zone of Universal Pictures, the studio where he'd been treated as royalty for most of the 1950s and '60s. He's on location for most of this film and far from the amenities he was used to at Universal City. He has a befuddled look much of the time, which certainly suits his character here.

The burgeoning romance between Hudson and Cardinale (who were born about 13 years apart) is given some resonance by the inclusion of a segment of b&w home movie footage where a younger version of Cardinale's character (played by a teenage actress) is filmed on a family outing with her father and Hudson, a friend of the father, and is seen cavorting playfully with Hudson in the throes of an adolescent crush straddling the precarious borderline between innocent and flirtatious.

I was won over early on by a location scene in Manhattan where Hudson and Cardinale have a key meet-up outside the old Commodore Hotel, which once hosted Star Trek conventions that I attended. (The hotel site on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue is now occupied by the Grand Hyatt.) It seems to have been very cold when they shot the scene, with their breath quite visible. Neither actor is wearing a hat or scarf. And then, instead of suggesting they go inside the warm hotel to talk, they opt to take a walk along Park Avenue to enact their scene. We can see for ourselves the kind of discomfort that even two top stars of the era were likely to experience when they signed on to do a low-budget Italian genre film.

Later on, they show up at Central Park on Fifth Avenue and Hudson is compelled to kick somebody out of a phone booth at the entrance to the park. "Police business," he barks at the hapless caller, before entering the booth to make a key phone call to determine how much time he has to help Cardinale return some valuable jewels to the Austrian estate she stole them from. Now, I've been going to Central Park for decades and I don't recall ever seeing a phone booth anywhere on Fifth Avenue along the park. Sure, the filmmakers could have moved the action to a site nearby that would have been a more likely spot for a phone booth but then I wouldn't have been able to enjoy this glimpse of the park as it looked 44 years ago, roughly the time I began my regular visits there. Kudos to the production designer for exercising dramatic license and providing one of the many small pleasures this film has to offer. The larger pleasures are, of course, Cardinale's performance and Morricone's score. Do we need to ask for more?

Tony Lo Bianco (THE SEVEN-UPS) has a small role as McCluskey, a cop working under Hudson in New York. Tomas Milian, a mainstay of Italian westerns at the time (e.g. THE BIG GUNDOWN), has an amusing cameo as an anarchist friend and sometime lover of Cardinale. The film was a byproduct of its peculiar historical moment, offering a hazy snapshot of its era, and would not have been made in quite this form at any other time. Enjoy it as the time capsule it remains.