IFF Film Review: "Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell" (1968).

"Take someone you love to a nice, warm, funny picture about a nice, warm, unwed mother." This is Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. This comedy film directed by Melvin Frank, adapted by Frank, Denis Norden and Sheldon Keller and based on the short story of the same title by Aiken Morewood. During World War II, an Italian villager befriends three American soldiers. Later, when unsure which of them fathered the daughter she has, she invents a dead captain named Campbell, declares herself his widow and accepts support checks from all three soldiers. Twenty years later, a reunion unexpectedly brings the three veterans -- and their wives and children -- back to Italy. Mrs. Campbell panics as she endeavors to keep her lively past from her daughter.

By early September 1967, Gina Lollobrigida, Janet Margolin, Philippe Leroy, Naomi Stevens, Phil Silvers, Shelley Winters, Peter Lawford, Marian Moses, Telly Savalas, Lee Grant, and Giovanna Galletti were cast in a film adaptation of Morewood's short story, Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, with Frank as director and penned by Frank with Norden and Keller. At the same time, principal photography commenced and took place throughout Lazio, Italy and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome.

The film stars Lollobrigida, Margolin, Leroy, Stevens, Silvers, Winters, Lawford, Moses, Savalas, Grant, and Galletti. It would be easy to underrate the deceptively effortless master acting class that Lollobrigida puts on here. As for the rest of the cast, you sense that they were thinking what you're thinking: That they couldn't actually be in this movie. Silvers, Lawford and Savalas have a great time playing the dimwits who may be Gia's dad.

The film has been made with the most delicious, joyful abandon and all it asks is that you joyfully and deliciously abandon yourself to it and don't make too many observations. Like a big gay Terminator, the film will track down your cynicism and blast it into smithereens: it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you're having fun. Yeah, it's all a little bit on the camp side. It's a comedy based on Morewood's short story. A little bit camp is probably the height of restraint. It can be seen as not fun or carefree, it's just tacky - lost in a sea of clichés and contrivances that somehow makes even its fantastic music lose its appeal. A chintzy valentine to the world-shaking ebullience of one's own flimsily "empowered" friendships and one's most offhanded and tarted-up whims. The film was so exciting and entertaining that I felt swept away. As if I was a wedding attendee, cheering on Sophie to discover herself and for her mother to find happiness. You could spend all week eating bacon at a pig farm and still find more ham in the film, an irrepressible, unstoppable kaleidoscope of karaoke camp gone berserk that features a cast happily mainlining Morewood's short story. The movie gets by on sheer exuberance. Your appreciation of it, I suspect, will strongly depend on your mood and the enthusiasm of the audience members around you.

Simon says Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell receives:

Also, see my IFF review for Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio).