That's "Pecky Cypress"-- and it's quite the rage!
Bob Hope is A.J. Niles. a Kinsey-esque writer of books about the sexual mores of Europeans. In keeping with the times, the books are coyly titled: "How the French Live" is understood by all to be shorthand for "How the French have lots of sex"; the first scene underscores this, as Hope is seen reclining on a chaise with a beautiful woman. He dictates salaciously into a tape recorder: "Kissing a mature French woman provides the average male with an experience that is..."Unfortunately, Hope was a little old to be playing the part. As he gets frisky with the young French mademoiselle, you get the squicky feeling that you might want to call the authorities.
But the great part about "Bachelor in Paradise" is that Hope, along with his costar Lana Turner, seems to be in on the joke. They know they are too old to be playing the parts they are playing. They know the jokes are tired. They know that the movie-going public was five steps ahead of the film at all times. But it didn't matter, because the suburbs were beautiful and everyone had a dishwasher and we all knew what to expect from Bob Hope and Lana Turner.
That is the seductive nature of films like this. They are fluff, you know they are fluff, the players know they are fluff, and everyone is fully aware that life was never really like that except in our misty memories. It's just that watching Bob Hope and Lana Turner frolic through the California Coral, you get to thinking maybe life really WAS that pretty in early 1961. I mean, as long as you were white and lived in the suburbs.
The plot is formulaic: A.J. Niles has to come back to the U.S. to face charges of tax evasion, brought on by his dishonest bookkeeper, Herman Wappinger ("I just can't believe Herman Wappinger is dishonest! That man wears piping on his vest!" I always loved that line, although it never made any sense to me at all.) His publisher, Austin Palfrey (the stuffily fabulous John McGiver) has an idea for a way that Niles can pay off the government while producing a new bestseller: he will subsidize Niles' move to an American suburb to write about "How the Americans Live". When Niles demurs, Palfrey tells him that he's already lined up a home in Paradise Village. The catch is that, given the nature of his fame, no one in the community can know that he is A.J. Niles. He must go undercover, as it were, to gather information about American mores. As expected,wackiness ensues.
What follows is a travelogue of late 50's kitsch: the "California Coral" house, the pecky cypress siding in the living room, the disappearing bar, the matriarchal sway of the American suburb, the dissatisfied housewives, headed by the statuesque and lovely Linda Delavane (Paula Prentiss) who adore this strange bachelor for listening to them and treating them like human beings ("I'm sure," Paula says dryly, "that the good lord did not intend me to use my Phi Beta Kappa key to puncture the top of a grated cheese can"). What no one knows, of course, is that Niles is using them as lab rats.
When glamorous Dolores (Janis Paige)--the estranged wife of the stuffy development owner--falls for Niles, she introduces herself with my very favorite line in the whole movie: having followed him home from the supermarket one morning, Dolores tells Niles she wants a cocktail ("Can you make a very dry Gibson?"). Niles gives her the drink, and she asks if he's having one.
"No," he says. "It's a little early for me."
"Early?" she says. "It's April!"
The movie reinforces every sexist stereotype about the time period: Lana Turner starts out as a single-minded career woman and ends up realizing that what she really needed all along was a man to take care of. Paula Prentiss waxes nostalgic about her days as a college student--studying romance languages--but cheerfully endorses her life as a 'hausfrau' (in a nod to Prentiss' extraordinary height, when Linda tells Niles she went to college on scholarship, he eyes her up and down and says "Basketball?" Come to think of it, they must have filmed Prentiss, Hope, and Prentiss' 6'5" co-star Jim Hutton from interesting angles; either that or Bob Hope was taller than I thought). When the denouement comes, all of the wives desperately want their husbands to find them worthy of continued matrimonial interest and pledge to go home and be good.
Lana Turner is gorgeous as Rosemary Howard, although her acting is wooden and awful--her monologue in the Tahitian restaurant ("I can refinish furniture, skindive for abalone, and play the piano..." comes off like she is reading it from the napkin on the table in front of her--but she looks fabulous. Both Hope and Turner come off oddly stilted, although that might be due to the contrast with accomplished character actors like McGiver ("You must tell no one who you are! Use an alias! Your mother's maiden name! Or...was 'Niles' your mother's maiden name?") and Reta Shaw as the neighborhood busybody, Mrs. Brown ("Certain passages of ALL of Mr. Niles books are filthy. That's what makes them so popular!")
This is not a deep movie. If you dissect it by the rules of critical thought, it is not even a very good movie. But it's a time capsule of a life that a lot of people think about with fierce nostalgia. A time when you could entrust your child to a stranger at the grocery store, have a Gibson at 10AM without raising an eyebrow, a time when pecky cypress was all the rage. I was born the year this movie came out, and I don't miss that time, but it's pretty to look at once in awhile.
score 7/10
sjrobb99-997-836393 12 August 2013
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2849885/34961
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