Back-Seat Romance

The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a 1930 model Phantom II that serves as plot, theme, star and principal setting of this elegant, old-fashioned movie about roadside sex. Its occupants are a host of celebrated players driven by liveried chauffeurs, bodyguards and carnal desire. In three unconnected episodes of varying length and quality, they pass the Rolls from owner to owner, testing its serviceability for back-seat amours.

Rolls-Royce gets under way in high style when Rex Harrison, as a British Foreign Office nabob, goes out to buy a motorized bauble for his wife (Jeanne Moreau). "I don't much care for the shape of the decanter," Harrison purrs, eying the built-in bar accessories. He has the automobile delivered during a party on Ascot eve, and Veteran Director Anthony Asquith (The V.l.P.s) begins scratching through the smooth surfaces of leisure-class life with exquisite malice. At dinner, Moreau arranges a tryst with one of Harrison's subordinates (Edmund Purdom), masking her passion with some sprightly table talk about the anchovy sauce served on British trains. Next day, while Harrison's horse wins the Gold Cup, Harrison's wife loses herself to Purdom in the Rolls. Milord and milady ride home afterwards, exchanging scarcely a look, but telling all that needs to be known of their future together in a few strokes of luxuriously civilized acting.

More than 20,000 odometered miles later, the Rolls turns up in Genoa. Climbing aboard are a U.S. gangster (George C. Scott) and his moll (Shirley MacLaine), both battling Scenarist Terence Rattigan's notion of dialogue for ugly Americans. "So it leans," cracks Shirley at the tower of Pisa. The fun picks up when Scott returns to the States to eradicate a business associate, leaving his two snazzy chassis in the care of Bodyguard Art Carney. On a swimming expedition, Shirley and the Rolls are left unguarded just long enough to entertain Alain Delon, utterly persuasive as a gigolo-photographer who cannot resist going astray for a pretty face, particularly his own.

Finally the limousine appears in Trieste at the beginning of World War II, bought by a cranky American millionairess (Ingrid Bergman) who heads for the Yugoslav border spouting kind words about Hitler, though she cannot abide Roosevelt or Reds. Thanks to the rebel partisan (Omar Sharif) stowed away in her trunk, Actress Bergman --radiantly unconvincing throughout--takes an abrupt Left turn, ends up ferrying guerrillas through the mountains and dropping 20 years from her characterization.

If The Yellow Rolls-Royce looks worn at times, it is always appropriately overprivileged in high-powered personalities and spectacular sets. They are so seductive that the film coasts smoothly through those uneasy stretches in which an audience becomes all too conscious of the ticking of the clock.

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