HOUSEBOAT: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1958) Kino Lorber

Director, Melville Shavelson’s Houseboat (1958) is misleadingly billed as a romantic comedy. Too bad. The finished film is trimmed in heavy-handed pathos for the Winters’ children, Elizabeth (Mimi Gibson), David (Paul Petersen) and Robert (Charles Herbert) whose father, Washington diplo’, Tom (Cary Grant) is stricken by a crusty, but benign resolve to somehow make them a family again after the death of their mother. Given Grant and co-star, Sophia Loren (cast as the bubbly Cinzia Zaccardi) were on the downswing of their torrid romance begun a year earlier on the set of The Pride and the Passion (1957), the chemistry between them in Houseboat is nothing short of acrimonious. Grant – still wed to the mousy Betsy Drake at the time – cannot get it through his wooden head Loren wants nothing more of him afterhours, despite having already become engaged to future hubby, Carlo Ponti.

The making of Houseboat just seems like a cruel joke on Drake, who authored it in the hopes of costarring with her husband yet again. The two had appeared together in middling comedies; 1948’s Every Girl Should Be Married, then again in 1952’s Room For One More. And Drake, well aware Grant had strayed while abroad, sincerely hoped Houseboat would bring them together again. Instead, Grant pressed for Loren as his costar, handing over the necessary revisions in the script to his director, and writer/producer, Jack Rose. Each received screen credit. Drake did not. Grant and Drake would part company over Grant’s failed flagrante delictos with Loren between takes on Houseboat, living apart for the remainder of their marriage, which ended officially in 1962.

The grave difficulty with Houseboat is, with its instituted revisions to mold the striking Loren into a figure of projected motherhood, its lithe tale of three motherless waifs and their disenfranchised dad, finding unlikely solace after the introduction of a new housekeeper into their unhappy lives, evolves into grotesque absurdity as, from the outset, it becomes quite impossible to consider the stunningly handsome Loren as a matronly figure groomed for quaint domesticity. Instead, tricked out in gorgeous attire, supplied by Paramount’s resident costumier, Edith Head, Loren is the epitome of that moniker, ‘the Italian Cinderella’, foisted upon her by Paramount’s publicity department. Those polished nails never cracked an egg in their life. It still might have worked superficially, except Loren is clearly warding off the advances of a lover she just wishes would go away.

And hence, there is a perpetual frost in the air between Tom and Cinzia, who should be falling in love. The rom/com mashup is further derailed by Grant’s occasional ogling (he really can’t help himself), and the manufactured sentiment between the children, feigning a bond in their communal loneliness while the artifice and machinery behind Tom and Cinzia’s eventual trip down the aisle takes hold. The real trouble with Cary Grant here is he’s 53 to Loren’s 24, with the show casting him as a father of three kids under the age of 13. Despite Grant’s perpetual youthfulness, grandfather is more like it here. And there is just something about Grant’s demeanor in general that never spoke to the precepts of fatherhood. Even in his youth, his aims as an actor were better skewed towards the unattainable and debonaire man about town, sans any long-lasting romantic entanglements, and most certainly, without the responsibilities of family.

Throughout Houseboat it is virtually impossible to think of Grant’s Tom in a familial way, or even as empathetic to his kids having lost the one parent who was always there for them until recently. Co-star, Martha Hyer, as Tom’s sister-in-law, Caroline Gibson, on the cusp of divorcing her own husband, seems a better fit for Tom from the outset. And Tom’s rather spiteful resolve to uproot his children from the only home they have ever known, a spacious estate in Virginia, traded for the confines of an exceedingly cramped bachelor’s pad in Washington D.C., merely to prove a point to his late wife’s brittle parents (John Litel and Madge Kennedy) is as cruelly misguided as the rest of Houseboat’s plot.  

The worst of it, however, is Shavelson and Rose are straining for painful pratfalls and screwball sight gags even Cary Grant, an absolute master in their art of execution, has outstayed their welcome by at least half the picture’s runtime - unfunny in the extreme. Take the instance where Grant’s Tom becomes so jealously distracted by mover, Angelo Donatello’s (Harry Guardino) attraction to Cinzia he fails to notice that the house Angelo is tractor-towing for the family to live in has suddenly become lodged on a railroad track until, inevitably, a fast-moving commuter plows into it. Forgoing the obvious, that such an impact would likely derail the train, resulting in casualties aplenty, not to mention a lawsuit, our story instead, and merely moves on to the next improbably entanglement – the discovery of the family’s future lodgings, a dilapidated houseboat moored on the bayou.

Once again, the story shifts its focus as Tom and Cinzia endeavor to fix up the place as the family’s primary residence. Tom gets both hands painted by his youngest son, before Cinzia spray-paints him in the face. How precious is that? As none are adept in their Bob Villa aspirations, rather predictably, more mishaps ensue. Along the way, little is made of Tom’s empathy towards his daughter, Liz, whom he periodically comforts during thunderstorms, or his rather cold admonishments of elder son, David, whose kleptomania is more an embarrassment than a concern for Tom. How dare David cramp his style? The awkward détente in their father/son relationship is brokered sometime later, and all too dramatically after the rowboat David uses in his flimsy attempt to escape the houseboat, capsizes in rough waters, forcing Tom to dive in his pajamas to swim out and rescue the boy.  

Houseboat is truly a mess of cliches, capped off by the prevailing satire of its times, that all children are adorable, guileless, but worst of all, miserably entitled to dictate to the adults in the room the trajectory for all of their lives. It’s the precociousness of these kiddies that lands Tom and Cinzia into their improbable wedding that caps off the show. Nothing else about Tom and Cinzia suggests that without the children’s stern-eyed forced march down the aisle, the couple would have discovered much to hold them together. As problematic, the Svengali-like relationship between Cinzia and her own father, maestro, Arturo Zaccardi (Eduardo Ciannelli), who thinks nothing of belting his outspoken adult daughter on the cheek, merely for speaking her mind. She prefers the bee-bop of American pop culture to dad’s stuffy highbrow Eurotrash froth. But in the end, and curious too, in spite of Cinzia’s total lack of experience in the domesticated arts, even Arturo believes Cinzia can do no better than to wed this middle-aged widower. So much for schooling/grooming Cinzia as a consort for a king.

Interestingly, Houseboat did respectable box office and was nominated for a slew of awards; 2 Oscars, a Golden Globe, a Bambi, a Writer’s Guild, and 2 Laurels for comedy – which it won!  While the picture has some obvious assets, Ray June’s beautiful VistaVision photography, half shot on location/half on obvious sets on the Paramount backlot, Edith Head’s incredible costuming, and, the rather catchy love theme, Almost In Your Arms, written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, as well as Loren’s bouncy solo, Bing! Bang! Bong!, regrettably, Houseboat never sets sail for buoyant waters. Instead, it sinks under the weight of its maudlin precepts about duty-bound parentage and the hokey and improbably promise that love’s young kiss can strike twice in a lifetime, in spite of all the emotional baggage toted around by two extremely unhappy people, ostensibly, in love.

As with everything that Paramount seems to do, Houseboat on Blu-ray is a half-ass endeavor. While Kino Lorber, the third-party distributors of this mess, are trumpeting this as a new 6K scan off an original VistaVision negative, the results are merely adequate rather than outstanding. Age-related dirt, debris and scratches are everywhere, resulting in a very unrefined image. At times, the wear and tear becomes the focus of the image. Color balancing, on the whole, is impressive, although flesh tones tend to toggle between almost natural, and pancake tan-colored ugliness. Loren is supposed to be olive-skinned, not mulatto. Diffusion filters used during Cinzia’s night out at a local watering hole were meant to evoke a creamy/dreamy escapism, but herein suffer from a distinct downtick in quality. Grain is sometimes apparent, and elsewhere, virtually nonexistent. Contrast is solid. But fine details are occasionally wanting – very odd for a VistaVision hi-fidelity release.

The DTS 2.0 mono audio is indicative of the original Westrex recording. But Houseboat was also given a Perspecta ‘re-channeled’ stereo track. No such track is forthcoming on this disc. Kino has also included an audio commentary from historian/writers, Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff. Like the movie itself, it’s a middling effort with no surprises and more than a few dry spots. Kino has overloaded this disc with trailers of other product under its license they are hoping to peddle. Bottom line: Houseboat is a dud. While it can look attractive, the alure here is all surface, seeing Sophia Loren presented in the rich hues of Technicolor wearing vintage Edith Head. The Blu is well below par for what it should, and might, have been. Sorry, but I've become a bit more brutal in my judgment on such things. We are not at the infancy of Blu-ray mastering where this sort of slapdash effort might have rated a 3.5 out of 5. It's long overdue on the other side of that rainbow. Paramount needs to wake up and realize it! Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2

VIDEO/AUDIO

2.5

EXTRAS

1