At least it's an island

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a while is Island of Love, which aired during Summer Under the Stars, I think when Tony Randall had a day. Anyhow, I recently watched it to do a review here.

Randall plays New York-based writer Paul Ferris, whose friend Steve Blair (Robert Preston) is a guy always looking for a way to make a quick buck. One evening at a Greek restaurant, Blair runs into Greek-American mobster Tony Dallas (Walter Matthau). Tony is there to announce his engagement to chorus girl Cha Cha Miller (Betty Bruce), but seeing Tony there gives Steve an idea.

Steve plans to produce a movie about Adam and Eve, and get Tony to fund it. Steve's plan is apparently to cook the books, since who knows how the movie is going to turn a profit, which is the other way you'd think Steve could actually wind up with the loot. In any case, Steve needs a screenwriter, which is why he turns to Paul. Unfortunately for Steve, Tony does have one condition for providing the funding, which is that Cha Cha play Eve.

As you can guess, the movie is a financial disaster, and Tony is none too pleased since he's not going to get a return on his investment. Steve wound up with a modest amount of money left over, and was able to use that to book passage for him and Paul to the island of Paradeios, where Steve had spent quite a bit of time during World war II hiding out from the Nazis, and making good friends with the Harakas family, whom he'd like to see again.

On the boat over to Europe, Paul gets his hands on a book about the island of Paradeios. There's been a legend about the island that is was the ancient Greek "Island of Love", with other Greeks coming from the rest of the Hellenic world to make offerings to the goes Dionysus and Eros. However, this book posits that the legend is untrue, since there's no archeological evidence for it.

Steve's plan is to plant some evidence so as to disprove the book, and resurrect the legend in order to turn Paradeios into a tourist mecca. Along the way, Steve meets little Elena (Giorgia Moll), who was the daughter of the Harakas family all those years ago. She's grown up into a woman who is quite fetching, although she's also being pursued by the professor who wrote the book arguing against the Paradeios legend.

The professor plans to disprove Steve's "find", something that would get Steve brought up on fraud charges. But making matters worse is that Cha Cha has gotten pregnant, moving up Tony's wedding. He's also planning to take her to Greece for an extended honeymoon. And, Steve just happens to be the uncle of little Elena Harakas, so when he comes over for the honeymoon, you know he's going to see his family on Paradeios and run into Steve and Paul.

While there's an interesting enough premise here, I have to say that Island of Love doesn't handle it particularly well. Steve is irritating as the con-man constantly lying to everybody, and you wonder what anybody on the island of Paradeios sees in him. A lot of people want to go to islands like Paradeios precisely to get away from the sort of stuff Steve wants to do. Tony is given a lisp for no good reason, and the conclusion of the story doesn't make all that much sense. The one good thng is the Greek location shooting, which has the advantage of being in color, unlike Zorba the Greek a year later.