1963 - LOVE IS A BALL, undemanding romcom

An innocuous time killer for the most part.  Love Is A Ball is the kind of film that the slowly dying movie studios were still pumping out in their foolhardy attempt to compete with television.  The film was filmed on location on the French Riviera so it looks pretty.  It has a good cast and some of the situations are rather humorous at times.

The semi complicated rom com plot goes like this.  Charles Boyer is a person who arranges very rich people to get married to impoverished royalty. He takes a penniless aristocrat in this case Ricardo Montalban and does a Pygmalion thing to him.  The makeover will make him acceptable to a rich American heiress played by Hope Lange.  Lange is playing a sexy party girl, she was an okay actress but the sexy party girl role may have been a little beyond her acting range.  Glenn Ford figures in this story as a championship auto racer who has to teach Ricardo how to be a race driver.  Glenn ends up going undercover as Hope's chauffeur so the director and writers can create a contrived romance between the two of them.

 

The film has an interesting cast besides the above mention actors.  Telly Savalas is Hope's guardian.  Savalas played a lot of "he-man" roles but in this film he's kind of a foppish character. Character actor Ruth McDevitt is Hope's Grandmother or Aunt or something.  I've seen McDevitt in a lot a lot of movies and TV shows, she was always a reliable presence in a movie.  Also showing up is Swedish actress Ulla Jacobsson in her first American film and clearly trying to break into the international film scene.  She's barely in the movie and really doesn't make much of an impression.

 

The director David Swift was kind of an old hand at this fluffy stuff.  He worked for Walt Disney and make a couple of good films, The Parent Trap and a very good version of Pollyanna.  He went on to make Good Neighbor Sam and an excellent film version of the musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  

 

For such a light piece of film junk the production was apparently not a happy one.  Glenn Ford clashed with the director frequently, he was apparently in his 'I'm a movie star" mode.  Ford and Hope Lange were a couple in real life which didn't help matters.  Swift was an unhappy camper during the shoot.

The was written by David Swift, Tom Waldman and Frank Waldman, the running time is 111 minutes.