What a beautiful movie!

An Exercise In Nonsense

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

SYNOPSIS: Self-styled "genius" is reduced to working for room and board as a live-in babysitter.COMMENT: An extraordinarily popular film in its day, Sitting Pretty had the good fortune to incorporate a tailor-made role for the waspishly caustic Clifton Webb - who was even nominated for a prestigious Hollywood award for Best Actor. He had previously been twice nominated for Best Supporting Actor (for Laura and The Razor's Edge) but once again he was to miss out - this time due to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet! Nevertheless, Sitting Pretty left Shakespeare for dead in the boxoffice stakes and sired two sequels: Mr Belvedere Goes to College and Mr Belvedere Rings the Bell. The comedy holds up rather well, although I said at the time and I say again; Richard Haydn makes a major contribution to the merriment. Webb actually comes on rather late in the piece. It is Haydn and Ed Begley who hold the audience's interest to that point. Young and O'Hara are pretty dull - though they make effective stooges - and their kids are the usual Hollywood brats. It is one of the film's joys that Webb uses them for target practice! Lang's direction is routinely competent but lacks any finesse of style or sophistication. (It always beats me why 20th Century-Fox was known as "the director's studio" - they had such an undistinguished lot of capable but boring hacks under contract: people like Walter Lang, Henry Koster, Henry King, John M. Stahl, Lloyd Bacon, George Seaton, Jean Negulesco. Perhaps King doesn't belong on this list for there are a few others, notably Gregory Ratoff and Edmund Goulding, whose work is equally variable, but how do they compare with Cukor, Wyler, Wellman, Curtiz, Farrow, Wood, Auer, Capra, Minnelli, Wilder, Huston, Walsh or Hitchcock?)OTHER VIEWS: A slick domestic comedy with a truly "original" character in Lyn Belvedere (there is only one "n" in his Christian name, though in the sequels two are adopted). Webb plays him to the "T", aided by a solid support cast headed by Richard Haydn as the snoopiest neighbor ever to hit suburbia. Of course the idea of turning village mores into a scandalous best-seller has been used many times (see The Affairs of Martha) - it wouldn't work anyway as most people couldn't care less about the town in which they're forced to live - but even this cliché does little to lessen the impact of Belvedere himself.

With Sitting Pretty, Clifton Webb created his most enduring film character, the aesthetic and acid tongue, self-styled genius, Mr. Lynn Belvedere. He enters the lives of the King family by answering an advertisement Maureen O'Hara puts in a paper about needing a live-in baby sitter.Never assume folks, Maureen doesn't specify the gender of whom she seeks and with that first name of Mr. Belvedere she and husband Robert Young assume they've got themselves a female. Belvedere moves in and he's quite the character. I'm not sure there's a subject or a field he's not well versed in and he's not above letting one know it. Thanks to a fussy busybody neighbor, Richard Haydn, Webb and O'Hara become the focal point of a lot of neighborhood gossip.Clifton Webb never had any luck with his three Oscar nominations. In 1944 for Laura he lost to Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way. In 1946 in The Razor's Edge he lost to Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives. Those two were for Best Supporting Actor, but in 1948 he was nominated for Best Actor and this time lost to the greatest actor of his generation playing arguably the greatest acting role ever, Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.Robert Young as O'Hara's husband is not generally commented on, but I've always had the sneaking suspicion that some astute casting directors saw Young in this film and decided he'd be perfect as THE television suburban all American father when it came time to casting Father Knows Best. For some reason Maureen O'Hara gave this film a fast mention in her recent memoirs and didn't discuss it at all. I'm not sure why, she certainly did well enough in it.Richard Haydn is also not commented on too much, mainly because he was playing a very typical Richard Haydn part. Clifton Webb of course was the cinema's closest thing for almost 20 years to an out gay actor and I'm sure Mr. Belvedere if done today would be more explicitly gay. So would that first meeting of Haydn and Webb where today it would be shown for exactly what it is, Haydn trying to pick up Webb and Webb turning the prospect down cold.Almost sixty years later, Sitting Pretty has not lost a bit of its entertainment value. Clifton Webb's Mr. Belevedere is an enduring cinema legend. I only wish the two succeeding Belvedere films were shown. I've never seen either of them as of today and don't ever even recall them being broadcast.

One of the things I remember having felt just after finishing seeing Sitting Pretty for the first time was intense pain. The sort of pain you get in your cheeks after indulging yourself in a session of heavy, near jaw-disjointing smiling. Whoa. In fact, this film stands out as one of my personal favourites. That kind of film you feel compelled to see once every year -at least- and one of these that would always appear in one of these absolutely annoying, regret-inducing, top-ten film rankings one sometimes is forced to produce upon friends' request.The plot, while not being exactly conventional, doesn't promise anything beyond the average comedy. But then the film relies not in the nature of the situations but in the way they are actually conceived to squeeze as much fun out of every nuance as possible. *Minor spoilers ahead*. Mr. and Mrs. King (Robert Young and Maureen O'Hara) enjoy a quiet, suburban life at Hummingbird Hills, with their three children. As the need for a babysitter becomes apparent, they put an ad in a newspaper which is promptly answered by Lynn Belvedere. Much to their initial puzzlement, Lynn turns out to be a *male* babysitter (Clifton Webb), but his amazing and seemingly endless display of skills makes the initial reluctance of the couple to melt, to such extent he soon becomes someone nearly indispensable to have around. But the suburban life has its drawbacks, and they come in the form of a nosy neighbour, Mr. Appleton –superbly portrayed by the excellent Richard Haydn- whose major activities, apart from gossiping, consist in pushing the wheelchair of her equally meddling mother, and pollinating flowers by means of a feather. The eccentric Belvedere falls like a bomb in the quiet neighbourhood, and soon the gossiping undermines the happiness of the family, propelling the story in a comedic crescendo with a plethora of funny misunderstandings, sizzling dialogues, skeletons frantically going out of almost everyone's closet, up to a fully fulfilling, comically cathartic end.Much of the reason of the film's success relies on the excellent casting. While Maureen O'Hara develops a charming character, full of wit and humour, the much underrated Robert Young renders an equally sparkling performance as the generally genial, but sometimes funnily annoyed because of Belvedere's overwhelming efficiency, American husband. However, the cream of the crop, the absolute star of the show is the awesome Clifton Webb. His Lynn Belvedere is something else, a true milestone in acting – as it had been his creation of Waldo Lydecker in Laura, the classic noir. The perfect timing in saying his dialogues, the little physical nuances here and there, together with that blend of near- contemptuous pompousness with an undergoing sense of humour that he manages to instil within his character, are just fantastic. The supporting roles are equally very well performed, but here the aforesaid Richard Haydn stands out with his unforgettable portrait of the go-between par excellence. Director Walter Lang, of 'The King and I' fame (the musical version, with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr) achieves one of his best films, if not the best hands down.By the way, it's a pity such a classic comedy had still not been released on DVD.-

Clifton Webb became a major star for a while on account of this film, in which he plays an eccentric genius who comes to live in the house of a young couple as a kind of general purpose servant-maid-tutor-savant-philosopher-critic. There was no end, it seems, to what Mr. Belvedere could do, and do extremely well. Walter Lang directs this pleasant picture with much skill, if not inspiration, and as Webb's employers, Robert Young and Maureen O'Hara make an attractive couple. Webb was a strange case. A huge star on the stage, his film career lasted less than twenty years. He was well into middle age when he started making movies, and at first he tended to play snobs and supercilious characters in general, starting with Laura, in 1944. Till Sitting Pretty came along he had appeared only in dramatic films, usually as a villain. Overnight, it seems, he was transformed, from upper class bad guy to loveable eccentric, and for a number of years he became a quite popular and unlikely star of often nostalgic films. Along with Charles Coburn, he was one of the last true Victorians of the movies, and as such a reminder of a more formal but also more individualistic time during in the postwar years. Sitting Pretty is an excellent showcase for Mr. Webb's unique brand of humor, as he managed to be superior and priggish but never mean-spirited.