Doubtful Pleasure

The Pleasure of His Company (Paramount) is requested at the wedding of Miss Debbie Reynolds to Mr. Tab Hunter at Grace Cathedral, Nob Hill, San Francisco. Because the requested company is that of debonair Fred Astaire, playboy father of the bride, there is bound to be some bounce. And with Lilli Palmer, Fred's ex-wife and the bride's mother, handling the arrangements, one can expect grace and polish. But otherwise, it is a Nytol nuptial. Where the 1958 Broadway play (by Samuel Taylor "with" Cornelia Otis Skinner) set in motion a sea of social-comedy soap bubbles--light, radiant and pleasantly airy--and kept them afloat, the film merely brains its audience with broad gags.

Astaire sneers delectably at a photograph of Tab in a football suit, sniffs at the gaudy ties of Lilli's current husband, Gary Merrill, and even changes the weight regulator on the man's Exercycle. What's worse, charming rakehell that he is (though never as arch, mocking or sphinxlike as Cyril Ritchard was onstage), he tries to freeze Tab out and lure his daughter away with promised trips to Venice, Positano and the Aegean Isle where Rupert Brooke is buried. At one painful moment, father and daughter, after a gay, French-talking night on the town, even do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

Thus, what might otherwise have been a lightheaded comedy of manners has undertones of incest and overtones of Andy Hardy. Still, the Bay Area scenery is silken, the sets and costumes effulgent; and at long last, a Hollywood production designer has learned something about the true-life tastes of the tasteful rich. Everybody is beautiful, worldly and fairly damned--everybody, that is, except Actress Reynolds, who, after ten years in pictures and a highly publicized scandal-divorce, is still playing the head pompom girl of Beverly Hills High.

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