User reviews

I saw this movie when I was a kid and thought it was pretty good. As an adult, however, I think it pretty much stinks. Natalie's character is just too much to take -- the writing is very bad. The guy chosen to play her husband shows no chemistry with Natalie whatsoever. Natalie is gorgeous of course and the clothes show she was the original "That Girl." Peter Falk is his usual glib self and with Dick Shawn I thought I was watching It's a Mad Mad Mad World. I've read that Natalie hated this movie and it almost seems to show in her performance. You can tell she and her co-star didn't have much going either; if you check the camera shots closely, it appears as if they shot a lot of their scenes separately. It's pretty sophisticated -- if you're 12 -- otherwise, save this one for when your're sick in bed with a fever.

Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Dick Shawn a great cast, NYC in the 60's a great location, even great opening credits… so how does this add up to such a boring movie? It is a movie I tried to there were some laughs and some great location shots, but what a bunch of annoying characters, I mean just about all of them. I guess Arthur Hiller was still just getting his feet wet; he did become a great director, and who would cast Ian Bannen as Penolpe's husband even as a straight man he's too much of a bore. As beautiful and sexy Penolpe is hers is the most annoying character of all, the Gracie Allen routine went out with... well Gracice Allen. I see that Hiller was trying to invoke the zaniness of the "screwball comedy" but this just came off as boring. High light - Natalie in her under garments being chased by Jonathan Winters

If nothing else "Penelope" helps to explain the attraction the French have for Jerry Lewis movies, as unlike these "Penelope" type comedies the Lewis stuff actually contains a fair amount of humor. During the ten years before the arrival of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Hollywood had virtually ceded comedy over to television and concentrated on epics and overwrought melodrama. Disney did funny stuff for children like "The Shaggy Dog" and Disney alumni did beach movies for teenagers, but only Lewis was doing comedy features.

Hollywood did try to pass off a few very mild titillation films (for adults) as old style screwball comedies and "Penelope" is as good an example of this mislabeled genre as any other.

"Penelope" was Natalie Wood's last big starring role. She looks great but had no business being cast in this role because "The Great Race" had already revealed an almost complete absence of comedic talent and timing.

Technically it is a well-made production with a decent if not particularly witty script. You get a sense that the set was full of underutilized creative and production talent, constrained from making the film into more than its producers wanted.

It is interesting to see a very young Peter Falk playing (big surprise) a detective and perhaps even more interesting to see Dick Shawn as a relatively straight laced psychiatrist (why did director Arthur Hiller keep Shawn's manic talents in check?). Jonathan Winters makes a brief appearance as Penelope's lecherous college professor (in the film's main titillation scene).

There is even an appearance by the ubiquitous Fritz Feld, playing his standard pompous Frenchman, and (another big surprise) making popping noises by slapping his mouth with the palm of his hand to indicate his superiority and impatience.

If you just want to "look" at "Natalie" you could do worse than "Penelope". If you want actual comedy from the 1960's you will do a lot better with Jerry or with Frankie and Annette.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

It's always fun to see Nat again. She was so pretty. This movie hasn't very much going for it but Nat and her marvellous Head wardrobe which is really the star of the movie. It just shows how powerful Head became at this point in Hollywood. Edie was by now writing books on how to dress as well as appearing on TV regularly doing makeovers for civilians. It is a bit of a waste to see Peter Finch in his pre-Columbo days as well as some well-used character actors inc. the usual penny-pinching stealing Jew selling Penelope's designer clothes at marked up prices from a thrift shop. It's unfortunate that Hollywood was still stereotyping people, but as I always say, stereotypes come from a large portion of the population that is exactly that. I speak from firsthand experience. I'm a gay man who admits the stereotypical 'flaming faggot' does exist in great numbers in the community and is unfortunately still around (witness 'Queer Guy' and the worst designer queens available they hired for the show). So, yeah, NYC back in the 60s was rife with back-stabbing retail Jews and I suppose they included him as a token. So, go for the looksee at what was chic in 1966 and forget the other.

It's the opening of the City Federal Bank and an old lady with a gun is robbing the bank. It's a costume. It's Penelope Elcott (Natalie Wood), the wife of the bank manager James Elcott (Ian Bannen). She escapes and police Lieutenant Horatio Bixbee (Peter Falk) investigates. She tells her psychiatrist Gregory the many times of her kleptomania but he refuses to accept it.

This is a comedy without laughs. I'm not sure where the jokes are supposed to be coming from. Natalie Wood is trying to be wacky but she's not actually funny. The only potential is that nobody ever suspects her despite the clues being all there. The problem is that she's not actually trying to hide. I must wonder if the robber's identity remaining secret until the last act would be helpful. She could play dumb for the whole movie and the reveal would shock the audience. The whole psychiatrist section is a drag. There is no tension or comedy coming from the flashbacks. Other than the opening sequence, this has no tension and nothing is funny.

This won't be a popular statement, but here goes: A friend of mine once called her Natalie Wooden and it rings true. She's beautiful and has charm and presence, and I've seen more than twenty of her movies because of that, but I was only once impressed with her as a mature actress, in "Love with the Proper Stranger." She is disastrous as the screwball heroine, Penelope, and the movie flopped badly enough for Wood to buy herself out of her Warner Brothers contract. She didn't work again until 1969, in "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice."

In almost every scene as Penelope, Wood is a clothes horse (all hail Edith Head) who delivers dingbat dialog in a sing-song voice, like a bouncy wide-eyed puppet. The film itself is a clumsy psychological spoof built around an effortless heist: Penelope, in disguise, robs the bank managed by her husband, James (Ian Bannen, unmemorably). The theft proves to be a stunt to get James' attention; Penelope never even spends any of the $60 thousand because she doesn't need it. They live in a spacious New York apartment with a Japanese butler (Lloyd Kino) and a Mid-Century Modern aesthetic, which is eye candy compared to the scenes in a beatnik dive in the Village. Completely out of character, Penelope sings "The Sun is Gray" in to a roomful of Maynard G. Krebs clichés. If the beatnik scenes had been cut, "Penelope" would have improved twice over because it would also have been shorter (137 minutes is at least 15 minutes too long).

The crime is solved by Peter Falk as Lt. Bixbee, but when he arrives on screen it's like he walked in from a better, less rambling movie, or a "Columbo" episode-- his persona as Bixbee anticipates Columbo's, attentive and congenial, but persistent and deceptively shrewd.

Falk's scenes with Wood are illuminating: a talented actor puts the limitations of pretty movie star in high relief. Wood is also outperformed by a supporting cat that includes Lila Kedrova and Lou Jacobi as two elderly con artists: their comic timing and delivery is flawless. Dick Shawn contributes a robust performance as Penelope's daily psychiatrist. Unfortunately, Jonathan Winters is wasted as a college professor who chases her around his laboratory in a scene that brings me back to the word clumsy: witless and poorly edited, it wasn't amusing clowning then, and is even less so since #MeToo.

The plot drags at first, but twists rather cleverly toward the end, when Penelope is satirically hoist on her own patrician petard: her snooty friends are even less trustworthy than she is. I began to wonder, as it played out, if a comically gifted contemporary of Wood's had been cast instead-- Stella Stevens and Jane Fonda come to mind-- if this screwball comedy might have had legs. I only tuned in for Falk, Kendrova, and location filming in Manhattan in the mid-60s.

The score is unremarkable except that it's by the astoundingly prolific John Williams, who already had 30 movie credits to his name in 1966.

Natalie Wood certainly looks spectacularly beautiful in this movie. She wears gorgeous clothes, stunning wigs, great jewels, and an astonishing number of breathtakingly beautiful fur coats. A different dead animal draped around her every 15 minutes! Is this a 'good movie'? I dunno. The plot is dumb, and actually I just watch it with the sound turned down, not even trying to follow the plot, because it is just such wonderful eye candy. Look at the divine Ms. Wood, tripping in high heels and glamorous outfits, down the street of a New York that is no more. Look at the divine Ms. Wood, in her eye-popping New York apartment complete with house boy, being neglected by her busy banker husband. It's like a screwball comedy of the 30's (think the idle rich in their all white mansions full of flowers, getting up to all kinds of funny business) updated to the 60's. And here is something else: this was made in 1966, at the height of the swinging' 60's - the miniskirts, the Beatles, the hippies, Viet Nam - and not a trace of the swinging' 60's can be found. It's all fur coats and jewels and little silk sheath dresses and hats and gloves. Made for and marketed to Natalie Wood fans of course, and people over 30 who turn their noses up at those crass loud young people! Not to mention those filthy hippies! . A whole different, parallel world existing side by side with the younger world. Mad Men ladies who lunch, in expensive Edith Head concoctions. Their day was already past, but you wouldn't know it from this movie.