The Taming of Dorothy

Her Favorite Husband is a curiosity in the career of elegant Italian director Mario Soldati, as his first English language film during an era when his country's industry was reaching out with foreign co-productions.Part of the awkwardness of the gangster comedy may be his uncertainty with the British crew and cast. Strangely it uses an old trope, a look alike whose identity is confused with the other he resembles, that Soldati had tried once before in his 1939 Dora Nelson, a remake of a 1935 French comedy. The implausibility of the device is stretched further when the gangster's former girlfriend lands up getting a household job, without her knowing, in the apartment of the same look alike, the bank clerk. A promising opening scene in a customs line with that old scene stealer Margaret Rutherford displaying outrage at petty invasions of her dignity later gives way to a silly slapstick style sequence in the apartment with various characters running in and out of rooms hitting each other. But (a big but) the noir like gangster mood while not taken seriously on the script or acting levels is beautifully evoked in the lensing of later cult horror auteur Mario Bava. Soldati worked with him to wrap settings in rich shadows and to heighten a sense of depth with sharply focused backgrounds and perspective staging. In this formal aspect at least the mise en scene yields much pleasure.

You know that a film has problems when the first scene is the funniest.After the confrontation between Rutherford and Harker on the one hand and the French custom officials on the other everything goes downhill.The premise for the film has been used before,one of the best examples is "The Whole Towns Talking" with Edward G Robinson.The problem here is that the script is unfunny,the director is no John Ford and Robert Beatty is no Robinson.The director seems to think that directing at a frenetic pace will cover over the cracks,well sadly he was misguided.It is a criminal waste of the talents of Rutherford,Harker and Kent.as for Beatty ,well he should have known better than to attempt comedy.

Dorothy (Jean Kent) is married to a mousey bank teller (Robert Beatty) and leads a quiet life in Naples. Her parents (Margaret Rutherford, Gordon Harker) come for a visit and also dump on the henpeck, even taking over his bedroom and banishing him to the couch. Meanwhile, a local thug, Leo L'Americano, realizes that he is a dead ringer for the bank teller and sets up a plan not knowing that his gang.led by Rosana (Tamara Lees). is planning to kidnap the bank teller. From that point on, no one can tell which guy is which and things get complicated.

Takes a while to get going, but this mistaken identity farce is quite funny and boasts a solid cast. Kent and Beatty are good in the leads. Rutherford and Harker are solid as the parents. Lees is funny as the moll. Rona Anderson plays the maid, Max Adrian is a hoot as the lawyer Catoni, and Danny Green plays Angel Face the escaped convict.

Robert Kent (sporting a terribly fake Italian accent) is a henpecked bank clerk in Naples. He's married to Englishwoman Jean Kent, whose parents, Gordon Harker and Margaret Rutherford, are visiting for, seemingly, the sole purpose of abusing him. Kent also plays an Italian-American gangster (with another terrible accent), who has discovered his double and plans to impersonate him to rob the bank.

It's hard to believe that a cast like that could produce a dull farce, but this is one of those misbegotten Ialian-British co-productions which prove that while the two nations could produce lively farces, their styles mixed as well as water and petroleum jelly. There's not one one-dimension character to root for, no wit in the lines and the only physical humor is when Kent (as the bank clerk) is held captive by the fact the gangsters have stolen his pants. there is one decent gag, when the policeman interrogating Kent keeps having his Tensor-style lamp collapse on him.

Mario Bava was the cinematographer on this movie. No wonder he made his mark as a director of giallos!

This is supposed to be a comedy, but it isn't funny. Robert Beatty is a humble and rather bullied bank clerk who happens to look exactly like a ruthless gangster, who discovers the likeness and decides to avail himself of it by putting Robert Beatty out of the way (Antonio) and take over Antonio's part and identity in order to rob his bank. This all happens in Naples, so there is sure to be a tremendous mess of confusion. Antonio is happily married to Jean Kent (who bullies him) with a small son, and it so happens that her parents come from England on a visit, Margaret Rutherford being the formidable mother-in-law. Of course, in this film they all speak fluent Italian, but no one in the entire film speaks the Neapolitan dialect. The whole intrigue is artificial and impossible. How is it possible for a wife, married since many years, not to notice when her husband's place is taken by another? The only interesting character and actress in the film is Tamara Lees as the gangsters' femme fatale, who makes a striking entrance in the beginning of the film, and she is the only one in the entire film who doesn't get hurt nor fooled. Danny Green also has a part playing the ordinary great oaf of a professional hoodlum knowing only brute force as his only language. The only asset of the film is a great cinematography, but that cannot outweigh the gross baseness of this very superficial film of ordinary Neapolitan knavery.