This is family values stuff about a woman who is so crappy at raising her three bratty kids that she has to hire an obviously closeted gay guy to move in and do it for her!
Even though you would expect a sissy babysitter to elicit a lot of laughs while trying to raise three rambunctious boys, Mr. Belvedere (Clifton Webb) is often reduced to sniping from the sidelines, delivering his catty lines to various members of the King family. (This usually seems woefully out of place in a domestic setting except when he’s putting the snoopy neighbor in his place.)
What’s that? Did someone say Mr. Belvedere? What? You thought that Belvedere was always some porky guy outwitting baseball hall-of-famer Bob Uecker? No, no, no, my sitcom-myopic friend. You see, long before the ABC TV show, there were three feature films starring Clifton Webb as the fastidious butler (he’s portrayed pretty much as a baby sitter in this movie though) who knew everything about everything!
Though Belvedere does have a few good lines, the movie resorts to some pretty unimaginative physical comedy to keep us awake.
There’s the time when dad comes home from the office and there’s a chair stuck in the middle of the staircase and you immediately start the stopwatch to see just how long it takes for him to go tumbling down the stairs with it.
You’ve also got the time when dad decides to climb a tree in the middle of winter to peek into Belvedere’s room to get an idea of what secret project Belvedere is working on. Guess what happens about twenty seconds into this scheme? As soon as he even mentioned going up there, I just had these images of Al Bundy falling off his roof on all those episodes of Married With Children. I guess the classic comedy bits can be re-used again and again – even if they aren’t funny and are telegraphed a mile away.
Maureen O’Hara plays the befuddled wife who is a stay-at-home mom, but still can’t handle her three brats, so she’s in the market for a new babysitter. She isn’t all that good in this movie and for whatever reason can’t seem to deliver her lines in a convincing manner. Several times her acting called to mind some modern parody of this type of bland domestic comedy like you might find on Saturday Night Live or Mad TV.
Robert Young was clearly more at ease in this type of story than she and was a painless enough presence in the movie. Of course, this was just before Young became the quintessential fifties dad in Father Knows Best, so it was a bit like having Michael Jordan playing in the Special Olympics. That isn’t to say that Young’s character wasn’t a total boob, because, well, he was.
If you’ve got some sissy middle-aged babysitter living with you who hates kids and dogs, wears pajamas, and takes a “morning constitutional” every day, are you ever going to worry that Maureen O’Hara is going to have an affair with him? Heck, Maureen ought to have been worried that he was going to have an affair with her husband! Yet, not once, but twice, does this whole “Belvedere is pumping my wife” angle intrude in on the movie and unfortunately becomes a main plot point toward the end of things.
Once Belvedere shows up, he gets the kids and the family dog whipped into shape in short order. The movie never really explains how he is able to do this, but just writes it off as simply another thing that he’s an expert on. When asked by the parents what it is that he does, he replies that he is a genius and leaves it at that.
Belvedere is also working on a very special and very top-secret project that requires him to be locked in his room for long periods of time. The King family is naturally very curious about what their mysterious male babysitter is doing in the spare room, but other than trying to unlock the door and peek in his window they don’t really put much effort into finding out if he’s part of some terrorist cell or running a moonshine still or who knows what in there.
So what is he up to? He’s writing a tell-all book about the town he’s living in!
When the book comes out, the townspeople who are savaged in it are pissed and it causes Robert to lose his job at his law firm. His boss was portrayed as a skirt chasing dog and since it was Robert’s babysitter that wrote the book, well, you know how the business world is!
Somehow or other all this commotion causes Robert and Maureen to get back together (yes, they had broken up at some point due to Robert being convinced that she was having an affair with the gay babysitter) and also allows Robert and his best friend to finally start their own law practice after Belvedere hires them to defend him in a libel suit filed by pretty much the whole town, even though Belvedere spent the whole movie telling Robert what a moron he was.
By this point in time, the whole babysitting angle had been forgotten and once they got around to it again at the very end of things by announcing that Maureen was preggers and that Belvedere would be staying because he had two more books to write in his trilogy and was an obstetrician in one of his former jobs, you’re breathing a sigh of relief that the other two Belvedere movies aren’t available on video yet.
Not funny, clumsily plotted, and the main character is such a cold unfeeling jerk, you have no desire to see his further adventures. The concept of the small town tell-all book and its fallout was handled with more hilarity in the melodrama Return to Peyton Place.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
