Britain looks at Italy again

I've suggested before that just becaues something is not of Hollywood doesn't mean that it's some sort of brilliant forgotten gem. By the same token, there's always a thing for British comedy, but Britain could make comedy movies that are just as tepid as the failures that came out of Hollywood. I couldn't help but think of this as I watched the thoroughly mediocre film Village of Daughters.

This was one of those films made at MGM's British unit (the same director, George Pollock, also made the four Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films), although many establishing scenes were done in Sicily, since that's where most of the movie takes place. A brief introduction, however, is set in London, where we're introduced to a poor man, salesman Herbert Harris (Eric Sykes); and a rich man, Italian immigrant businessman Antonio Durigo (Mario Fabrizi). The opening narration informs us the two men's paths are going to cross.

Now, the rich man's presence in Italy is perfectly logical. His father grew up in a small village in Sicily, and emigrated to London, where he worked his way up the business world from the bottom and left his son in charge of the business. But Antonio is not married, and his father (unseen in the movie) was always insistent that Antonio marry somebody from his home village of Magento. It's now time for Antonio to go back to Magento to find himself a wife.

However, there's a disproportionate number of unmarried twentysomething women in Magento, largely because the village is so poor that all the marriageable men have left for the bigger cities in search of employment. You'd think that they'd eventually send for wives from the village, but that apparently doesn't happen. And with Antonio about to arrive in town, there's not really anybody to arrange a suitable marriage. So the local Catholic priest, Don Calogere (John Le Mesurier), suggests that the next neutral male stranger who shows up in the village should be the man to pick a woman for Antonio since such a man would have no prior interest in making one woman very rich.

As you can guess, Herbert is going to be that man. He somehow got the company he worked for to send him to Catania on Sicily to sell the company's goods, but he's had no success, with the results that he gets fired. So he heads for Palermo, presumably to get back to the Italian mainland and from there to the UK. But he doesn't have the money for a ticket, so the bus driver kicks him off in the middle of nowhere, with Herbert making his way to the nearest village. That of course is Magento.

Not that Herbert wants to be here, and certainly not that he wants to be involved with playing matchmaker. But then he learns that there are a lot of marriageable and good-looking women here, and they're just as interested in him as they would be in Antonio when he shows up. And they're willing to compete for Herbert's affections.

It's a plot that sounds like it could be a lot of fun. But for me, Village of Daughters didn't really work, for several reasons. One is that it feels more like the sort of material that, in a Hollywood movie, would be viewed as the sort of rosy view of the Old Country and its stereotypes. As the main plot basis for a movie, that just goes way too far over the top. Then there's the fact that for me, a lot of the comedy didn't really hit its mark. Finally, Herbert comes across too much as a slick operator type, trying to get a lira or a thousand out of everybody he's dealing with.

Perhaps if Village of Daughters had been filmed in bright color, it would have been able to show off the beautiful aspects of Sicily the way that later 1960s Hollywood and UK movies set in Europe do. But what we have is a bit too trite at best.