OVP: Houseboat (1958)

Film: Houseboat (1958)
Stars: Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, Martha Hyer, Paul Peterson, Charles Herbert, Mimi Gibson, Harry Guardino
Director: Melville Shavelson
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Screenplay, Original Song-"Almost in Your Arms"
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our look at Sophia Loren's career a bit further along than when the general public might have become aware of Loren.  Loren had become something of a big name in Italy prior to 1958, with her breakout role in 1954's The Gold of Naples, directed by Vittorio de Sica, who had already made major international pictures like Shoeshine, Umberto D, and Bicycle Thieves (which is, for the record, one of my all-time favorite movies), and so headlining one of his films would've been a very big deal.  However, Gold of Naples is harder to find than you'd think considering the pedigree of both the director and his lead actress, and plus we're going to get to a collaboration between de Sica & Loren that was more pivotal to her career later this month.  So instead we're going to start with one of the films Loren made as a result of a widely-publicized contract with Paramount, which brought her to English-speaking cinema, and provided some early hits in her career, specifically today's feature Houseboat.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Tom Winters (Grant), who works in DC at the State Department and whose estranged wife has recently died, leaving his children without a mother.  While the children want to stay with their Aunt Carolyn (Hyer), Tom refuses, taking them to his small DC apartment, and realizing pretty quickly that he'll need assistance raising them.  When his youngest son Robert (Herbert) runs away, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Cinzia (Loren), who is the wealthy daughter of a storied conductor.  Cinzia is mistaken for being poor, however, and Tom hires her as his housekeeper & a nanny to the children.  Besotted by the kids and wanting to get away from her oppressive father, she chooses to do so, and we get an opposites-attract relationship between both Tom & Cinzia until, inevitably, they fall in love and she becomes the permanent mother to the three children.

The film is one of many-such pictures that Grant made at the time.  Grant's career never really floundered throughout Classic Hollywood, though I'll argue that the standards of his romantic comedies went from all-time classics like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story to merely fun movies that lack the sophistication of the work he was doing at the time with Alfred Hitchcock.  That said, Houseboat is a fun movie.  The script is bouncy (though repetitive), and the original song "Almost in Your Arms" is luscious and beautiful (sung by Sam Cooke of all people).  The film even won a Golden Globe nomination for actor Harry Guardino, a supporting part as the guy who owns the houseboat that the family lives in in the latter half of the picture, and who is lusting after Cinzia the whole film (side bar-I had no idea that Guardino was nominated for this performance, and honestly was stunned that such a routine performance in a stock role came so close to an Oscar nod considering this important precursor).

Loren, of course, is our star, and I don't want to skip out on conversing about her.  She's fun in this part.  Obviously English is her second language, and there's some growing pains between her trying to translate the gifts of Italian cinema (whose focus on realism in the era couldn't be more at-odds with Houseboat's feather-light romantic comedy) into a film like this, particularly against someone like Grant (with whom she'd just ended a real-life affair with on the set of The Pride and the Passion).  We're not going to spend a lot of time on Loren's career in Hollywood, as next week we'll move back to her films in Italy and largely stay there for the remainder of the month, but it's nice to have a counterweight into Loren's American career, particularly since I leave thinking she's just okay, and had I seen Houseboat in 1958, I would have liked her, but been stunned that she'd be less than three years away from winning an Oscar.