Bachelor in Paradise

Next up in the series of movies that I've got sitting on my DVR and are coming up on TCM is the Bob Hope comedy Bachelor in Paradise. It comes on early tomorrow morning (or overnight tonight, if you prefer to look at it that way) at 4:00 AM.

Hope plays A.J. Niles, and as the movie opens he's on the French Riviera. Niles is an author who has written a series of books purporting to be on the lives of various European countries, but are really an excuse to scandalize people with the steamy look at Europeans; think Peyton Place levels of scandal. Niles hasn't lived in America for a decade or so, which would imply not lot after the end of World War II since the movie was released in 1961. That being an expatriate turns out to be a big problem.

Even in those days Americans had to pay income tax on their worldwide earnings even if they didn't actually live in America (technically, you only have to file a tax return; there's a good chance an expat will fall below the tax threshold or else have paid enough tax abroad to avoid a US tax liability). Niles earns enough that he definitely would have to pay tax to the US, especially since the earnings are royalties from book sales in the US. But the plot point of the story is that Niles' accountant failed to pay those taxes for years. Even so, Niles is still liable, and owes some $600,000 in taxes. And this also means the IRS won't let the State Department renew Niles' passport. So Niles is going to have to return to America and pay off his tax debt somehow.

Fortunately, Niles' editor Austin Palfrey (John McGiver) has a brilliant idea: write a book called How the Americans Live similar to the books he's written about various European countries. Since Niles' photo hasn't been printed on the dust jackets of his books, people don't know what Niles looks like; also, he can work under an assumed name. To that end, Palfrey is going to rent Niles a house in one of those new-build suburban developments that sprung up like mushrooms in the years Niles was in Europe, this one in a Los Angeles suburb called Paradise.

The only thing is, this particular development caters to families, and Niles is a bachelor. Indeed, he's going to have to rent the house of one Rosemary Howard (Lana Turner), the assistant to the builder. Niles, taking the name Jack Adams, immediately tries putting the moves on Rosemary, who isn't having any of it. There's also humor in the idea that Niles has no idea how to keep house, especially in a suburb like this, as we see when he makes a mess of things with next-door neighbor Linda Delavane (Paula Prentiss).

To do his research, Niles starts offering lectures to the assembled housewives, although this winds up having the effect of changing the dynamic between various husbands and wives in the development, not always for the better. Additionally, Niles the writer has a bad reputation because of how "scandalous" those books are. It all winds up in a big court case where everything is revealed and we get to the requisite happy ending.

Bachelor in Paradise isn't the world's greatest movie, but it's better than some of the films Hope made later in the 1960s, some of which were terrible. A lot of people say, and I think I'd agree, that another really nice thing about the movie is how it looks at then-contemporary suburbia closer to how it actually was (there was location shooting in Woodland Hills, CA), and not that revisionist view of the 1960s that media wants to push today. People who like mid-century modern design will probably love the production values of Bachelor in Paradise.