Even the great Billy Wilder couldn't quite bring off the commoner and the Royal lady tale in The Emperor Waltz and he had Bing Crosby, technicolor and location shooting going for him. Michael Curtiz is a fine bread-and- butter director and versatile with it but he's no Wilder just as John Gavin is no Bing Crosby. What this movie does have is Sophia Loren doing ravishing, Gavin doing mahogany, Maurice Chevalier doing Gallic charm - and just missing - plus Angela Lansbury phoning it it. The pedigree was good enough, a play (Olympia) by the more than competent Hungarian Ferenc Molnar, translated by Sydney Howard, but the lavish costumes and splendid sets can only take us so far and sooner or later we need to see some quality emoting but alas this never transpires. Pleasant enough as a time-waster.
Review of A Breath of Scandal
