Every Little Crook and Nanny

Another of my recent movie viewings to try to clear some space off the DVR was Every Little Crook and Nanny.

Lynn Redgrave plays Miss Poole, who runs a school that teaches children to be good little ladies and gentlemen, teaching them dance especially, but also comportment and other sundry stuff. One day in the middle of class, a bunch of goons walk in and start dismantling the place! They're from the Ganucci organization, which a Mafia family, but don't you dare say that the Mafia exists. The head of the family, Carmine Ganucci (Victor Mature), has bought the buiding to use for running local numbers games, and poor Miss Poole is out of luck even though she has a lease.

Carmine is planning on going back to the old country with his wife to do some business, and he wants to leave his son Lewis (Phillip Graves) behind since he's been raising Lewis not to know that his dad is part of the Mafia that we all know doesn't exist anyway (this is a running joke throughout the movie). His lawyers Azzecca (Dom DeLuise) and Garbugli (John Astin) are helping him find a nanny. So far, none of the nannies are to Carmine's liking.

That is, until Miss Poole comes storming into the office. She's not a nanny, mind you. It's just that she's pissed about what Ganucci did, ruining her office and injuring her pianist Luther (Austin Pendleton). She wants to be compensated for this, and is out for blood. Carmine sees Miss Poole and, in a case of mistaken identity, immediately thinks she'd make a great nanny for Lewis.

Miss Poole takes the job, if only because it allows her to come up with a ridiculous plan. She'll stage a kidnapping of Lewis, and set a ransom high enough to cover her losses from the school and to be able to start a new life. Of course, she knows nothing about kidnapping, but that's beside the point. She and Luther plan it, and after it goes off seemingly without a hitch, Poole turns to one of Ganucci's low-level gangsters, Barry Napkins (Paul Sand), to help get the ransom.

It's here that problems begin to show up. Benny isn't particularly competent, while nobody else wants Carmine to know what really happened, so they -- especially Garbugli and Azzecca -- try to get the money in a roundabout way. Carmine wants a money transfer for his business deal in Italy and Benny is engaging in petty larceny to raise the money, so there are multiple sets of money in the amount of the ransom going around. Luther is the one holding Lewis, and his wife Ida decides she'd really like a kid.

Every Little Crook and Nanny is a movie that sounds like it has a really good premis, but which winds up not quite working. I'm assuming Redgrave wanted to do a comedy, and she looks like she's having a lot of fun doing it. But the movie is supposed to be a relatively light comedy, at least light for the sort of material it's covering, so something like The Trouble With Harry or Too Many Crooks; not something heavy like a Paddy Chayefsky satire. Every Little Crook and Nanny, however, descends into a much too complex plot to save it as a light comedy.

Every Little Crook and Nanny is available on DVD if you want to judge for yourself.