Samuel A. Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner's Broadway success becomes a torturous family comedy which drowns in forced gaiety. Fred Astaire plays a world-renown traveler and bon vivant who returns to San Francisco to see his little girl get married (they appear to be estranged, and he worries she won't even recognize him, only to find she's harboring a crush on dear old dad with no animosity). Astaire's Pogo Poole puckishly turns the household of his ex-wife and her husband upside down, while all the time maneuvering himself between his daughter and her cattleman fiancé. Taylor, who also wrote the screenplay (which goes heavy on the mocking of the Asian help), hasn't re-imagined this material for the movies, and director George Seaton is of little help. The actors wear themselves out with their many entrances and exits, dropping little 'laugh lines' behind them like land-bombs. It's an exhausting piece, certainly not buoyed by Astaire's irritating performance. Hoping, perhaps, to be disarming, the star clicks off his lines as if from a check-list and tends to rely on silly, exaggerated faces. He overplays the slight material to his disadvantage, for we never get a handle on this character (is Pogo a charming buttinsky or just a royal pain?). Astaire doesn't connect with what's going around him, taking control of his scenes without realizing how obtrusive he's being. Lilli Palmer and Debbie Reynolds fare somewhat better, but the rest of the cast is lost in a witless display of romantic comedy which is bereft of both comedy and romance. * from ****
Review of The Pleasure of His Company
