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Manhattan harmonies, the Musicians' Hall like a ballroom filling up behind the opening credits, cf. Olmi's I Fidanzati. Reunion of the footloose player (Steve McQueen) and the Macy's salesgirl (Natalie Wood) following a half-forgotten one-night stand, she's pregnant. "It was just a stupid experiment." "A hotel full of women, I wind up with Louis Pasteur." He's shacked up with the burlesque queen (Edie Adams), she suffocates in a cramped flat with her fortissimo Italian clan, whose idea of the ideal match for her is a klutzy cook (Tom Bosley). ("A movie star on a horse" is the dream dismissed by Mamma, a packed suitcase is enough for the lass.) Love in the city, the tender center of urban bustle. "Oh boy, how they build things up. In the books, in all the movies..." An expansion of Robert Mulligan's New York (The Rat Race) for Hollywood's growing pains, rather like Becker's struggling young couples and parallel with Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving. A squalid room sets the stage for the clandestine appointment, a curt abortionist snapping her rubber gloves in the shadows, the protagonists' embrace in the back seat of a taxi is superimposed over a nightscape flickering with neon. Choice location filming, from the spectral side of the Meatpacking District to the courtyards in front of the United Nations Headquarters. Romance, "kind of kicky" for some people and "chopped liver" for others, nothing less than "bells and banjos" for the heroine seizing her independence at long last. (The vitellone has his own trajectory of maturation to fumble through: "You know something? If you didn't try so hard to play against it, you could be a pretty decent person.") Passersby bump into the camera in the happy ending, Mulligan resumes the Mediterranean conflicts in Bloodbrothers. With Herschel Bernardi, Harvey Lembeck, Penny Santon, Virginia Vincent, Nick Alexander, Augusta Ciolli, Anne Hegira, Mario Badolati, Marilyn Chris, Nina Varela, and Elena Karam. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |