The Inn Crowd

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 Desvallieres. 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 epoque make decades melt away--particularly in a smoky, golden cafe 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.

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