Cinema: The Inn Crowd

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Hotel Paradiso. Putting the right people in the wrong beds is the principal preoccupation of French farce, but this sumptuous period piece gets rather confused about the sleeping arrangements: it's the moviegoer who does most of the yawning.

The actors work assiduously trying to put new bounce into a comedy written more than half a century ago by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallières. Gina Lollobrigida, looking as delicately outraged as a piece of fine cracked china, plays the neglected bourgeois wife of bumptious Robert Morley. In revenge, she undertakes a night on the town with Neighbor Alec Guinness. The sly old seducer lures her to a disreputable inn where—true to formula—his promised evening of bliss ends up as a harmless orgy of slammed doors and mistaken identity, climaxed by a chase involving a fat lady, a nephew, an upstairs maid, a seething proprietor, a bellboy, gendarmes, four skittish schoolgirls, an underdressed chanteuse and a doddering duke.

Paradiso is an eye opener only when Photographer Henri Decae has charge, for his views of Paris during la belle époque make decades melt away—particularly in a smoky, golden café scene reminiscent of Lautrec, with portly naiads up to their chins in gym suits and a matronly stripper dismantling her corsetry on an overhead swing. Also visible behind the potted palms and spiral staircases is Director Peter Glenville, impersonating Playwright Feydeau. Glenville as Feydeau wears a wise, conspiratorial expression, presumably to suggest that middle-class morality can be terribly droll. But Glenville as Glenville hasn't the faintest idea of how to get the fun on film.