Another of the stars in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Gina Lollobrigida. She made a pair of movies with Rock Hudson. I already did a post on the first of them, Come September. The second is Strange Bedfellows, which, being a Universal movie, hadn't shown up on TCM before. (That would also explain why I hadn't heard of it.) In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to put up this post on it.
The movie starts off with an opening scene told in narration. In London in what would be the late 1950s, Carter Harrison (Rock Hudson) is an American working for the American-Allied Petroleum company in London. He's the sort of stereotypical conservative businessman type, but on his first day in London he meets bohemian Italian artist Toni Vincente (Gina Lollobrigida). They go to bed together that night, already married. And then they wake up the next morning to find out that they have nothing in common and that Toni can have a rather violent temper. So the two separate, which is also a bit unsurprising considering that Carter's work takes him to all sorts of oil-rich sheikdoms and similar places.
Fast forward to the present day. Although the husband and wife haven't seen each other for seven years and don't really have any intention of ever seeing each other again, they also haven't really bothered to go through the motions of getting a divorce. At least not until now, when TOni starts the proceedings which is also going to have them meet, at least with their solicitors in tow. But there's also a catch that comes up.
Carter's PR man with the firm, Richard Bramwell (Gig Young), informs Carter that he's up for a promotion to an executive position when he gets back to Boston. However, this being a conservative business, the president J.L. Stevens (Howard St. John) would like a family man in the position. Carter getting a divorce might be a problem, but then having Toni as she is would also cause issues. In addition to the bohemian artist type, she also involves herself in the sort of social causes that would make conservative executives blush. Since this is the 60s, there's nothing environmental here; it's more helping the third world and more importantly, freedom of expression, complaining about the American museum not wanting to display a supposedly controversial sculpture (never actually shown). Harry Jones (Edward Judd) is the point man for the organization, and you get the impression that he'd like to romance Toni if that divorce ever went through.
So Carter is trying to convince Toni that he really loves here, while Bramwell is working on a scheme that might prevent Toni from going ahead with the anti-American protest. Bramwell's scheme involves another oil-rich region where the restive natives are busy killing UN diplomats, and saying that Carter is going to be sent there to negotiate following a briefing in the Bahamas. That fake briefing is just a ruse to get Carter and Toni on vacation together before the board meeting in Boston. Harry, as you might well guess, figures that there's something hinky first about Carter trying to repair his relationship with Toni, and then all this stuff about Carter having to go on a potentially fatal diplomatic mission. So he sets up a ruse of his own to try to determine what's really going on.
This is the sort of romantic comedy where you have to figure that the Rock Hudon and Gina Lollobrigida characters are going to end up together at the end, so the question is how exactly they get there. There are parts of Strange Bedfellows that are good, but the resolution relies on stuff that's way too much a series of coincidences that feel more forced than funny. It's a bit of a shame considering the cast who all put in respectable performances. It's not really their fault that the scrip is letting them down.
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