The Ambassador's Daughter

If you've ever watched Three's Company, one thing you can't help but admit is that the plots of mistaken identity and misunderstandings are thoroughly unoriginal. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Three's Company as I was watching The Ambassador's Daughter.

Olivia de Havilland plays the daughter here, and frankly she's much too old for the part, but that's another story. She's Joan Fisk, daughter of post-war US Ambassador to France William Fisk (Edward Arnold). They're visited by a US Senator, Jonathan Cartwright (Adolphe Menjou) and his wife (Myrna Loy), doing the sort of visit that Jean Arthur was making to Berlin in Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair. Specifically, Sen. Cartwright is concerned about the plethora of American GIs who are taking their furloughs to go to Paris and cause difficulty for all the French folks there. So he thinks the military should make Paris off-limits to American servicemen, and is trying to get General Harvey (Minor Watson) to do just that.

The ambassador isn't so sure, and his daughter decides that she'll offer to do some undercover research to discover just what American serivcemen are like, by pretending to be French and dting a visiting serviceman for the duration of his furlough. And wouldn't you know, she's quickly going to get the chance to do just that. A charity fashion show is going to be given to raise money for the American Red Cross' work in France, with various socialites playing the part of the models. Crashing their way into the audience for the show are two GIs, Sgt. Danny Sullivan (John Forsythe) and his best friend Cpl. Al O'Connor (Tommy Noonan).

Danny sees Joan, who is one of the models, and falls for her, while she puts on her best French accent and does nothing to disabuse Danny of the belief that she's a model for Christian Dior. So she willingly goes around Paris with him, although we of course know the real reason she's doing it. Gen. Harvey, meanwhile, brings Al back to the US Embassy, where he promptly has too much to drink and spills the secrets of things American servicemen do to try to win the hearts of European women.

Unsurprisingly, Sgt. Sullivan unwittingly does some of the same things, but out of pure innocence, having no idea that he's falling into a trap that Cpl. O'Connor has unintentionally set. When Joan learns of what Al has told the Senator and the Ambassador, she's ticked off because she wanted to help the servicemen keep their right to visit Paris, and look what they've done to her. But she also does something which leads to a misunderstanding. Danny decides to go to the Christian Dior house to look Joan up, and she, not actually being a model, shows up with the Senator to try to get him to buy a dress that he saw at the Red Cross fashion show for Mrs. Cartwright. Danny sees this, and thinks that Joan is two timing him with a sugar daddy.

Eventually, it all gets worked out for the best, although there's also the added complication of Joan having a fiancé in the form of a now-stateless prince (Francis Lederer). But boy does it take a long time to get there and do so unoriginally.

Olivia de Havilland had recently married a Frenchman and started living in Paris at the time the movie was made, which I'm sure is a large part of the reason why the movie got made at all. She was there, and it was a way for everybody else to get a working vacation in the City of Light. The establishing shots of Paris are lovely, but that's probably the best thing that can be said about the movie. The plot strains credulity and feels like a mish-mash of romantic misunderstanding movies that had been done at least since the start of the screwball era (although The Ambassador's Daughter is not a screwball comedy by any means).

Completists of any of the main cast members may want to see The Ambassador's Daughter, but for everybody else, I'd recommend a whole bunch of their other movies over this one.