The Rolls-Royce of color

Anthology movies have a lot going for them, both in terms of watching and in terms of doing a blog post on. If you don't like one of the stories, you don't have to wait too long before the next one comes up, and when writing about it, it's pretty easy to give a brief synopsis of each segment and come close to a full-length post. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch The Yellow-Rolls Royce.

As you can probably guess from the opening paragraph, the movie features several stories involving... a yellow Rolls-Royce. Three stories, in fact, with the car being a 1931 Rolls-Royce according to IMDb and the stories set not too long after the car would have been made.

First up, we're in Britain. Rex Harrison plays Lord Frinton, a British aristocrat who is a higher-up in the British Foreign Office as well as an owner of racehorses who is intent on winning the upcoming Gold Cup. He's married to Lady Frinton (Jeanne Moreau), and they recently celebrated their anniversary, which he forgot, so he buys her the Rolls-Royce to make up for it. What he doesn't realize is that she's been carrying on with Fane (Edmund Purdom), an underling of his at the Foreign Office. So when he finds out, he gets rid of the car which is how we get the second story.

Somehow the car makes its way to Italy, where American gangster Paolo (George C. Scott) is visiting with his chorus girl girlfriend Mae (Shirley MacLaine) and his driver Joey (Art Carney). Mae sees the car and likes it, so Paolo buys it for her. They meet a photographer in Florence, Stefano (Alain Delon). When Paolo has to go back to the States to take part in a gangland shooting, Mae looks up Stefano again and starts a brief affair with him, one that she knows she's going to have to give up when Paolo returns.

She gives up the car too, which somehow winds up in the possession of Gerda (Ingrid Bergman), who married an American businessman who died some time back, leaving her fabulously wealthy. She's in Trieste in early 1941, which if you'll remember from Diplomatic Courier, was right on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. Gerda is planning to visit the new Yugoslav king in Belgrade, but this being 1941, Yugoslavia is about to be attacked in World War II. Gerda winds up taking the mysterious Devich (Omar Sharif) across the border, where he is raising a group of freedom fighters. He eventually enlists Gerda and the Rolls-Royce to collect all of them.

Personally, I more or less liked the movie, but I found that all of the stories had something not quite right about them. I think it's down to who was cast in various roles. Jeanne Moreau was nondescript as the British wife, a role that probably should have gone to a British actress. In the second segment, Scott overacts terribly while Alain Delon is not right as an Italian. Finally, I wasn't particularly a fan of Sharif in the last segment, while Bergman is made to act like Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in the climax of Idiot's Delight.

Still, each segment just about works, and there's a lot of fabulous scenery in the last two segments that bumps up the movie a bit. Italy looks gorgeous in widescreen and color, too. The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a pleasant enough movie that never quite rises to greatness, but never sinks either.