Cinema: Upward Nobility

Lady L. Careering madly through the countryside, a battered Daimler eats up both sides of the road, veers away into grassy fields, finally wheezes to a halt at one of England's stateliest homes. Out of the limousine steps Sophia Loren as Lady L, a spruce 80-year-old who bears a striking resemblance to the late Dowager Queen Mary. Well-wishers greet her with respect, for she is the progenitor of four generals, an admiral, a bishop and other dignitaries, several of whose names escape her.

It is a fine loony beginning for a high comedy in period style, but the flashbacks that follow bring Lady L to a spotty end. Her confession story, plucked from Romain Gary's novel by protean Writer-Director Peter Ustinov (who also spills out of a minor role as an addled Bavarian prince), describes how a scrumptious Parisian laundress rises to greatness as the wife of David Niven, one of England's most debonair lords. En route to her destiny. Sophia is delayed briefly in a bordello, which has chambers designed for train buffs or Arabian Knights. There she meets Paul Newman, who performs behind a large mustache, possibly to conceal the fact that he is hopelessly miscast as a bomb-toting French anarchist. In her title role, Sophia gleams like a crown jewel plunked down in a series of velvety settings to no particular purpose, though she is droll as a pregnant adventuress who has to decide whether to marry and let her son be born a duke. "It's a good career for a boy," she muses. Writer Ustinov seems to be improvising party games for a page-to-screen adaptation that stalemated various other Hollywood wags off and on since 1958. As Lady L finally flounces into senility, most of her problems remain unoriginal, unfunny and unsolved.