Penelope

I wouldn't call it a classic, but PENELOPE is definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon. Natalie Wood is gorgeous and quite funny in the title role, and she has an amazing wardrobe. Dick Shawn and Peter Falk (practicing for COLUMBO?) provide strong supporting performances as a psychiatrist and a police lieutenant, respectively. Unfortunately, Ian Bannen lacks charisma, making it hard to believe that "Penelope" would choose his character over every other man in NYC. With its bright, bold colors and criminal exploits, PENELOPE plays like an extended episode of the "Batman" TV series. In fact, the film includes a reference to Batman. Definitely a must-see for Natalie Wood fans.

This film is highly underrated. I have heard of how "Penelope" was a flop from other sources. I saw it on TCM today as one of the birthday tributes to Natalie Wood. To my surprise, I found this film highly entertaining. The dialogue was witty and funny. Love the humor. This is one of the comedic best of Natalie Wood! Dick Shawn, Peter Falk, and Ian Bannen, who played her analyst, a police detective, and her husband respectively, did a fantastic job as the three men who fell in love with Penelope. A very funny film, brilliant, brilliant film! I was not very fond of 60's humor, but I still found this film hilarious. Whether you are a fan of 60's comedies or not, I assure that you will enjoy it as much as I do.

Enjoyed this slap-stick film which dealt with all kinds of crazy things that Natalie Wood,(Penelope Elcott) "Sex & The Single Girl",'64, managed to get involved with, in order to get the attention of her husband, a Bank Executive. There are lots of laughs in this film and Natalie Woods had just gotten a divorce from Robert Wagner when she made this film and still managed to give a great charming and sexy role, where she runs around in her bra and panties. Peter Falk,(Lt. Horatio Bixbee),"Columbo TV Series" plays a police officer and seems to be captivated by the wiggle of Penelope's body and takes exceptions to putting her in jail when she really commits a bad crime against her poor husband. It is rather sad to view this film and see a beautiful Natalie Wood and realize she had to die in such a horrible way in life.

I don't know where this movie has been all my life. I'd have enjoyed it immensely when I was an adolescent Natalie Wood fan. Back then it might have been a personal favorite. Looking back over more than sixty years of movie-watching, I reluctantly write "Penelope" off as just another comic heist caper, of the kind that proliferated in the 1960s, though an immensely enjoyable one.

Wood plays the wife of a banker who is also a kleptomaniac who holds up her beloved husband's bank. Do kleptomaniacs rob banks? Well, that's the premise. She sticks up her husband's bank for the fun of it. But what can she do with the money? Will the detective catch her (since, in retrospect, we know the detective is secretly Colombo under cover, we have preconceptions). And how does that impinge on her marriage? Did she rob her husband's bank as an attention-getting device? And how does she get the attention without confessing?

It's one of those silly-sixties comedies with a good cast and (thank goodness) no depth. Jonathan Winters is wasted in a tiny part, so don't watch "Penelope" for him. Dick Shawn, who was never able to flower the way he should have been allowed to, fares well in one of his better (albeit fairly straight) roles as a psychiatrist who needs a psychiatrist. Peter Falk is the detective on the case: but is he really on the right track as much as he seems to be? The cast keeps unfolding, like they did back then, from Lou Jacobi in a plum role he makes delightful with his light touch, to Arlene Golonka to, in a dinky part, Jerome Cowan (who goes back to Fred Astaire movies).

The weak link in the chain is Ian Bannen. Rumor has it they wanted Dirk Bogarde for the part and he would have been fine, but equally as stiff. Bannen's a good actor when let off the leash but one I've never found funny. Back in his little-English-movies days they'd shove him in something like the Peter Sellers movie "Man in a Cocked Hat" as the straight man. Bogarde would have been equally wrong. They needed Laurence Harvey, who could have brought a wry wit to the role (why couldn't I have been a casting director?) Bannen's terribly miscast and they seem not to have informed him this was a comedy. He's not bad, he's just playing like he belongs in another movie.

The writing's a bit on the silly side, as comedies tended to be in the 1960s, though Wood has some lovely lines (of dialogue, I mean) and Shawn's perfectly wonderful as her desperate shrink. Their several scenes together are precious, in a good sense of the word.

The movie is overblown. It's wide screen with luscious sets, where people live in rooms the size of ordinary people's houses. Everything is too big for the slender plot. It also has several (stylized) flashbacks that vary greatly in quality though they all work together in a "pulp fiction" sort of way to fill in exposition, as if a movie like this needed any. I think the writers just didn't have enough plot to stretch ninety minutes.

I enjoyed the movie overall but I have a high tolerance for silly-sixties heist capers and for Wood, who may be an acquired taste in the twenty-first century. It's sad she died the way she did but I don't think she'd have aged well. She might have ended up making special appearances on "Murder, She Wrote" and "The Love Boat" and people would have said, "Is that Natalie Wood? I thought she was dead." Only, in this case, she was.

Wood was perhaps not the world's greatest thespian, but she's solid and effective here even if her performance hardly varies from the performances she gave in movies as varied as "The Great Race" and "Sex and the Single Girl." She's Natalie Wood. That's all we, her fans, expected of her, and that's what we got. We were satisfied.

The score isn't really that notable though it's by John Williams and the theme song, pure 1960s schmaltz, is terrible. Nothing dates a movie so quickly as trying to be of its time. An enjoyable movie if you like that sort of thing, and I do.

This weren't as bad as some people say. There's three reasons to watch it: (3) There is actually some funny and witty material here, (2) the photography is gorgeous--both the interior shots and the glamorous locales of mid-1960's New York, and (1) Natalie is stunningly beautiful.