A Man of 39 Needs His Sleep

Crazy Desire. "You look ten years younger when you laugh--you look fortyish," purrs the teenager. The man smiles grimly: "I'm 39," he says. As hero of this little-league Italian comedy that pits age against youth, Ugo Tognazzi plays, a late-maturing young businessman who boasts that he can get by with only four hours' sleep, though his physician deflates him by insisting that he needs eight, plus a nap after lunch.

One weekend, while Tognazzi is en route to his son's boarding school, lissome Catherine Spaak flags down his car. He gives her and her friends gas for their jalopy, joins them at a beach house where they natter about Sammy Davis Jr., improvise hymns to Brigitte Bardot, and listen to the recorded speeches of Adolf Hitler. During a frenetic weekend, Tognazzi nearly drowns when he goes for a swim after eating raw peppers. He competes in a humiliating Mr. Universe contest against hoods half his age, all to win favor with Spaak--a French actress so dear to Italian hearts that she appears to go from film to film with scarcely enough time to put on her clothes.

Tognazzi proposes to the delectable nymphet, suggesting, "We'll honeymoon in Disneyland." But all the hopeless attempts to recapture his youth end when he wakes up on the beach in a cold dawn, wearing a wet blanket and an Indian headdress, and surrounded by a ring, of torches, symbolically extinguished. Needless to say, he feels very old, tired, embarrassed, and drives off determined to forget the whole experience. Not a bad idea, since Crazy Desire is really just a compendium of childish whims.

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