Even the great Billy Wilder couldn't quite bring off the commoner and the Royal lady tale in The Emperor Waltz and he had Bing Crosby, technicolor and location shooting going for him. Michael Curtiz is a fine bread-and- butter director and versatile with it but he's no Wilder just as John Gavin is no Bing Crosby.
Sometimes, particularly when one is looking at a landscape or a portrait, beauty is sufficient. Movies are a different situation altogether and visual beauty is a bonus and certainly does no harm but it cannot carry a movie all by itself.
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.
But if you want a funny romantic comedy to go along with them - look out; you are in trouble with this film. I knew this film was going to be iffy when Sophia Loren was taking pot shots at a bicycling mail carrier in the opening sequences.
In 1960 this film did not receive audience attention because there were other film being shown that the public wanted to see, like "Psycho" and many other films. Most Sophia Loren films were not as popular in America and so Carlo Ponti brought his wife back to Europe and she made a very successful film, "Two Women" which won her an Academy Award and brought Sophia great notoriety.
Sophia Loren plays a horny princess from the Austria-Hungarian Empire (about 1910). She's been banished to her country home for 'bad behavior' though we aren't sure exactly what it means.
This is a really beautiful and charming film with a wonderful cast. Sophia Loren has never looked more lovely in the role of Princess Olympia alongside the handsome John Gavin in the role of Charlie Foster.
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.
In this handsome but very theatrical costume comedy, Ruritanian manners come back into the movies, featuring a former leading man back in the 1930's made them his specialty. Maurice Chevalier is an Austrian prince who arranges with the emperor for his daughter (Sophia Loren) to marry a very prominent Prussian prince.
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