 Clifton Webb plays a "self-declared genius with an impressive array of
talents". He takes a job baby-sitting for Maureen O'Hara and Robert Young and
before you know it, Webb's Mr. Belvedere is whipping the family into shape,
"but it is a bit longer until everyone learns the real purpose of his visit to
suburbia". 1948, 84 minutes, VHS
This is family values stuff about a woman who is so crappy at raising her three
bratty kids that she has to hire a gay guy to move in and do it for her! I was
expecting lots of stereotypical hijinks to ensue revolving around this guy
trying to bring some of his fresh attitude and sophisticated taste to his new
family (because we all know that gay guys are full of fresh attitude and
sophisticated taste). Of course, while I was prepared to laugh outwardly at
all the gay stereotypes this film was promising, I was prepared to inwardly be
outraged at the narrow-mindedness of the movie makers involved and was planning
on firing off a missive to those responsible, promising various boycotts and
picketing by folks with piercings and leather shorts just as soon as the
movie's 84 minutes had elapsed. Luckily for those suits at 20th Century Fox,
this movie was so low on laughs, I wouldn't embarrass my pierced,
leather-wearing friends by having them own up to ever having seen this thing.
You have to understand that for a kid who was raised on the Mr. Belvedere of
the eighties, this was quite a stunning blow. What's that? Did someone say
Belvedere? What? You thought that Belvedere was always some porky guy
outwitting baseball hall-of-famer Bob Uecker before getting married to a woman?
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, except for maybe how to unhook a woman's bra
strap. (Well, I should say he probably didn't know how to unhook it while it
was being worn by a woman, if you catch my drift.)  Clifton himself was a confirmed bachelor who lived with his mother until she
died and even though I wouldn't come out and say that he was gay in real life,
there are those with looser tongues than I that would. That has nothing to do
with this movie (other than the fact that I'll bet his mommy was on the set
with him to give him juice between takes) since Clifton isn't playing a gay
babysitter, but is in fact playing a sissy babysitter. Even though you would
expect a sissy babysitter to elicit a lot of laughs while trying to raise three
rambunctious boys, Belvedere 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.) 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 Rob 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 Rob'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.
And Belvedere didn't even appear in the movie until the first third of it was
over! A much better use of that idea would have been the one they touched on
early in the movie where Maureen was jealous that this sixteen year old girl
named Ginger was flirting with Robert. And Robert never really did much to
allay those fears and even went so far as to announce that Ginger's perfume
drove him wild and then forcibly kissed his wife to prove it! Creepy yes, but
also strangely entertaining.  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. Throughout the movie, things crop up in a variety of areas
that he has expertise in, but he mainly seems to be really good at being a
crabby old coot without a nice thing to say to anyone. And I can't imagine that
his child rearing tactics would pass muster now or at any point in history.
Though it was funny to see him teach the baby a lesson about throwing food by
dumping a bowl of cereal on the baby's head, I doubt that any parent would have
the same reaction that Robert did when he said he was glad that Belvedere did
that because the baby was always throwing food at him, too. Glad to see that
two grown men have the same mentality as the baby. The kids are likewise
portrayed in an unrealistic fashion as they instantly take to this guy even
though the only thing he does is yell at them and teach them yoga. Oh, he's
real good with these wimpy 1940s kids whose biggest rebellious streak is to throw
food at the dinner table. I'd like to see him handle a couple of our kids today
who smoke dope, listen to Marilyn Manson, and play violent video games all day
long. We'll see how much of his acid wit he's able to unload on them before
they bust a cap in his ass. Now Belvedere didn't just take this babysitting job because he hates kids and
wants to watch Will & Grace on the King's HDTV. He is 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? The mind
positively boggles with the possibilities, what with him being a brainiac and
all. Particle acceleration, superstring theory, perpetual motion machine,
synthesizing lead into gold? None of those would be beyond the scope of his
abilities (just ask him). What was it, you ask? (Because you and I both know
you'll never watch this - there's too many lame comedies that were made this
century and they have cussing and car chases to keep you occupied during the
long unfunny stretches.) He was writing a tell-all book about the town he was
living in! I'm sure that curing cancer and world peace are numbers two and
three on his list of top-secret projects, but a best selling satire about
suburban mores and hypocrisy? Truly the province of a fastidious male babysitter. 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. There's a couple of other people in
town who are made to look bad (uh, because they are), but this doesn't have
much of an impact on the viewer because we didn't even know about some of these
things in the first place or we spent so little time with those characters that
we simply shrugged our shoulders when all was revealed. 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. Somehow,
Webb was nominated for an Oscar for this, but luckily that was the same year
that Laurence Olivier was nominated for playing Hamlet. But I'm sure when he
lost, Webb made some snide comment about it. Come back Christopher Hewett, all
is forgiven!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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