A Breath of Scandal

I like Sophia Loren so much that I actually enjoyed this rigid, superficial international production (headed by Ponti) that seems to be trying to emulate - very unwisely - Max Ophuls.

A central European princess has a flirtatious encounter with an American businessman (John Gavin) in a hunting lodge. Drugged on medication she kicks her pyjama bottoms off in the night and on waking, finds a love note from him - placed on said pyjamas - thus setting off the motions of the scanty plot in which Gavin pursues her to Vienna like a pigeon on heat while she and her mother try to ward off the scandal-mongering attentions of Angela Lansbury.

There's not much to it and it's a bit repetitive. Gavin is wooden as a spoon, Loren's mother is unpleasantly shrill, and everything is smothered in rococo - plentiful scenes seem to have actually been filmed in Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna.

Loren's elocution-lesson English is charming, though as always it seems to hamper her acting. Somehow Maurice Chevalier gets to slip in a song - I suppose there was no stopping him - but the banter between the old-word aristocrat and the progressive American is sometimes funny. Gavin asks what he should do with the cross he is awarded and is told: 'Wear it on state occasions'. Gavin says 'State occasions?' Really the film is an excuse to get Sophia and her natural pout into a number of lavish outfits to bosomy effect. That works.