THREE BITES OF THE APPLE (1967)

Stanley Thrumm is a tour bus guide, taking a small group of travelers through Italy and Switzerland. Among the tourists are an older couple who keep asking to stop so they can use a bathroom, an American alcoholic, one of the amusing kind you find in movies, and a ditzy single woman of a certain age, Angela Sparrow, who is a bit man crazy and who sets her cap for Stanley, who resists her charms without much effort. On the Italian Riviera, Stanley winds up at a casino and spends the night gambling and winning, through dumb luck, 20 million lira (about 12,000 English pounds). The lovely Carla Moretti keeps an eye on him and, when he leaves the casino at dawn, casually attracts his attention and ends up spending the day with him. Even as Stanley falls for her, we realize that she is setting up a trap to get his money. Carla follows him to Rome and romances him as she plots a scam with her ex-husband Remo that involves getting Stanley to trust them with his money so he can take it out of Italy without paying exorbitant taxes. Angela, in her rather blunt way, continues unsuccessfully to try and seduce him, and in Switzerland, Stanley and Carla wind up stuck overnight at a mountain chalet where they sleep together and, of course, Carla begins to have second thoughts about her scam. Unfortunately, Remo is not about to give up the easy money.

I found many reasons to dislike this romantic comedy. For starters, there's the silly animated credits sequence featuring Adam, Eve, and the apple—and a rather bad song about the three sung by the star of the movie, David McCallum (pictured) who plays Stanley. Character development is problematic: Stanley claims he loves his job because he loves people, but we see no evidence of that in the offhand way he treats his tourists; and the tourists are differentiated just enough so that each one gets one brief highlight scene before fading into the background. The parade of events that make up the plot—the big win at the casino, the convoluted plan to get Stanley's money, the breakdown of the ski car that forces Stanley and Carla to stay at the chalet—is ridiculous. Tammy Grimes gives a dreadful performance as the dreadful Angela. She might have benefitted from going campy, but as it is, her flirting is just embarrassing. At one point, the money is hidden inside a large stuffed dog that Stanley lets Angela hold onto, and when he needs to get it back, he enters her room at night; when he won’t get in bed with her, she files a harassment complaint with the tour company that, in the end, gets him fired. So what is there to like about this mess? Well, the three main roles are played well. McCallum’s character is inconsistent, and he plays the rather passive role as if he was desperate to escape his dashing spy character, Illya Kuryakin, from TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but his puppy dog looks made me forgive him most everything. Sylva Koscina, who first came to international fame opposite Steve Reeves in the original Hercules, looks great and gives the best performance—she is the only one I believed in as a character. Domenico Modugno is very good as her husband (and, BTW, Modugno is best known for writing the international hit "Volare"). Harvey Korman is not bad as the drunk tourist, but after a couple of early scenes, he is more or less discarded along with the other travelers. Filmed on location, the scenery is lovely, and there is a nice comic fistfight late in the film with McCallum and Modugno. I'm about to damn it with my frequently used faint praise: I can't recommend it but I'm not sorry to have seen it. Make of that what you will. [TCM]