edwagreen Gable was starting to look his age in the year that this film came out would mark the year of his untimely passing. Sophia Loren is rather benign here. Though the film is a comedy, she needed to be more fiery. Too bad that Anna Magnani wasn't younger and more adept at comedy.Gable comes to Italy to settle the estate of his brother, who along with his wife, died in an accident and much to Clark's surprise, he discovers that his brother had an 8 year old precocious boy along with a sister-in-law played by Loren.Gable is on his way back to Philadelphia as he is to be wed but you know that isn't going to happen when he meets Loren and despite a custody battle for the boy, romance blossoms.

dimplet Don't overthink this movie; just watch it and enjoy it. We're talking Doris Day era here, but it's not that sugary sweet; Gable's cynical commentary gives it a bit of an edge. This cynicism is the key to understanding the movie. The Gable character was a soldier during World War II and helped liberate Italy. It is now 15 years later, and he is still resentful, remarking that the Italians were stealing gasoline from the Americans and selling it on the black market almost as soon as they arrived. He thinks his deceased brother a fool for having fallen for an Italian woman, a trap he avoided during the war. The film is also about the conflicting values of a straight-laced American lawyer and a beautiful Italian dancer-singer, or more to the point, between America the ambitious, versus Italy, represented by the notorious Isle of Capri, capisce? Gable wants to get his business done and get out as quickly as possible, but with time he comes to appreciate the beauty and relaxed lifestyle of Capri. And he discovers that the Italians have pride in their own country, and some resentment towards Americans. As such, the movie should hold up well for those foreign viewers who are so prejudiced against America and American movies. They can have a good time sneering at American values, represented by Gable. I don't have any problem with the chemistry; while watching the movie, I thought that perhaps the reason they made it was for Loren and Gable to have a little fling together. I was surprised to read they didn't get along so well. This movie is worth seeing, not just for Gable and the always gorgeous Sophia Loren, but for the reasonably interesting story line. It's not Gone with the Wind or It Happened One Night, but it is still two hours well spent.Spoiler: The plot is only resolved when Gable realizes, due to a chance encounter, that his deep-seated prejudices against the Italians were not justified. Well, not entirely. Sophia was trying to manipulate him, of course, but what woman doesn't? And the business with Gable's lawyer was curious. She couldn't have bribed him. I suppose she whispered a little blackmail in his ear, most likely a reminder of a mutual affair.

jumbopasatebos This movie had everything on paper, a great American actor(Gable), beautiful locations and the ever-adorable Sophia Lauren. But the script is so poor and idiotic that totally ruins everything...So, Gable, your typical Yankee, arives at Naples after his brother's death.He finds out that his brother had a secret second marriage and a child who currently lives with his Aunt (Lauren). Basically what the director wanted was to demonstrate the difference of go-like-it Italians and the more sober, cold, calculating Americans, a premise so stale and stereotypical that would need a special amount of skill to be formed into something watchable. And sadly this was not the case. Actually this movie is pretty brave, in a peculiar way. It has the audacity to denounce the whole neo-realistic Italian cinema where all these poor people struggle through life and it's miseries. Alas, what offers instead is a stereotypical view where poverty is equal to a happy ignorance. All the Italian characters are rude, messy and quarrel but always in a happy and delightfull way... They all try to speak "funny" English and although they are illiterate they manage it pretty good... They are not poor because of the war's damages , they are poor because they like it and they cannot do much better...Even so, if this movie had any kind of charm I could still accept it as your shallow typical romance comedy but, here, every joke literally back-fires at the character's faces. Take for example Nando, the little boy. He is illiterate, smokes and distributes Cabaret leaflets but that's OK because he is Italian and does not need an education. He lives with a prostitute in a dump but he's good and likes fireworks so that's OK... The American again loves hamburgers, tries to teach his nephew baseball etc.His fiancée dumbs him,only because she hears music from the telephone and does not know that in Italy it is OK to play loud music all day and all night...He tries to enlist Nando in an American school that will give him proper education, because all Italian schools must be really bad (they stretch the American school joke so far that you can't possibly imagine...) The acting is also really terrible. Gable stumbles across the film like a joke of his old self,and Lauren tries to be decent but has so little to work with and cannot save herself..This movie in all aspects is a total waste...

Nicholas Rhodes This film really has to take the cake as being one of the most romantic comedies ever made, I have watched it countless times and this year it was finally issued on DVD with excellent picture quality devoid of clicks, blotches and other compression artefacts.The film is plastically beautiful, the surroundings are out of this world, Sophia Loren is beautiful, sexy, funny, what more could you ask, Nando is a gorgeous character and Mark Hamilton ( Clark Gable ) carries his rôle to perfection. The dialogues between him and Nando are absolutely scrumptious. Yhe story line which alternates between moments of pure romance then quarrelling and back again keeps the spectator on his/her toes even if the outcome is guessed in advance. I just loved the scene where Gable is in the train, listens to the comments of his compatriots in the compartment, just gets up and goes .. an excellent ending. The sets of the film are beautiful, I have never been to Capri but it sure looks a beautiful and romantic place. The 100,000 euro question is "Does it Still Look Like that in 2005" . Hopefully one or more of the inhabitants will read this and let us know !!My only beef on this film is trying to get hold of the sound track, no cd in the world seems to contain it - surprising when you consider the number of film sound tracks now available. My favourite is actually the title song ( instrumental ) which was composed by a certain Alessandro Cicognini, and which appears at various intervals in the film, including in a vocal version sung in Italian with a rhumba rhythm - no one tells us what the title is - so God knows how this can be found. The song "Tu vuo fa l'americano" sung by Loren in the nightclub has fared better ! It has actually been sung by one of the artists well known here in France, Dany Brilliant and his version, though not as good as Loren's is not bad at all. As for the other tunes, no sign of them anywhere. Hopefully one day, someone somewhere will have the intelligence to issued the INTEGRAL sound track of this film on a cd. Given the amount of time we have had to wait to have the film on DVD, there may still be hope for a cd later. Brilliant !