Holiday for Lovers

Production: 20th Century-Fox. Dir Henry Levin; Producer David Weisbart; Screenplay Luther Davis; Camera Charles G. Clarke; Editor Stuart Gilmore; Music Leigh Harline Art Dir Lyle R. Wheeler, Herman A. Blumenthal
Crew: (Color) Widescreen. Extract of a review from 1959. Running time: 103 MIN.
With: Clifton Webb Jane Wyman Jill St John Carol Lynley Paul Henreid Gary Crosby

Publish date: 2024-05-27

This is a romantic farce travelog that plays smoothly with a good many solid laughs. There are drags in spots, the plotting is not always smooth, not all the situations play off. But David Weisbart's production has a good mixture of young players salted with veterans, and Henry Levin's direction keeps things lively. The point of Luther Davis' screenplay, based on Ronald Alexander's Broadway play, is that daughter, not father, knows best.

This is a romantic farce travelog that plays smoothly with a good many solid laughs. There are drags in spots, the plotting is not always smooth, not all the situations play off. But David Weisbart’s production has a good mixture of young players salted with veterans, and Henry Levin’s direction keeps things lively. The point of Luther Davis’ screenplay, based on Ronald Alexander’s Broadway play, is that daughter, not father, knows best.

Clifton Webb is a Boston psychiatrist confronted with two daughters (Jill St John, Carol Lynley) who are simultaneously bursting the adolescent cocoon to fall in love. The plot requires Webb and the girls’ mother (Jane Wyman) to trek through South America in frustrated chaperonage. All ends happily, in the contemporary American idiom, when dense parents capitulate to siblings’ wishes.

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The background of the film, chiefly Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, gives a fine opportunity to show a good deal of spectacular South American landscape and skyscrapers.

Webb, with his customary acerbity, takes a line and pins it to the wall, often managing to make humor seem like wit. Wyman has only a few opportunities for laughs. St John is pretty, but seems confused by some of her dialog. Lynley is a real film find, a cameo beauty who plays beat or sensitive and makes the transition with finesse.

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