Lady in Waiting

Never Too Late cannot accurately be called a screen version of the Broadway comedy hit by Sumner Arthur Long. It is the play itself, canned and sweetened and shrewdly spiced to suit mature housewives with an appetite for nice clean escape. Late is brazenly unsophisticated, as harmless as rose breeding and just a tiny bit more titillating.

The movie's boldest innovation is that the Broadway principals are allowed to repeat their roles: Maureen O'Sullivan as a small-town matron of grandmotherly age who haplessly becomes pregnant; and Paul Ford as her sixtyish mate, who reacts to his achievement with the dismay of a man who has accidentally set his garage on fire. All flab and fury, Ford ignites laughter on any occasion, whether he is donning dark glasses outside a layette shop or explaining at length that he likes "serious fun," such as tending to business down at the lumberyard: "Fun is when I go through that gate and the men say 'Morning, sir,' and I say 'Morning, men.' "

Given a one-joke script, Director George Abbott whipped it into a happy frenzy that survived for three seasons on Broadway. Movie Director Bud Yorkin borrows bits of Abbott's inventiveness, but his own method is to linger over a gag until all the life has run out of it. He belabors a drunk scene, overestimates the humor in the plight of Ford's married but childless daughter (Connie Stevens) who browbeats her callow husband (Jim Hutton) into orgies of planned parenthood. There is something unwholesomely prudish about a hip young modern who greets the revelation of her mother's impending event by crying tearfully: "All men are horrible!" The ribaldry of Never Too Late will seem rather unnecessarily self-conscious to many a potent sexagenarian, but Paul Ford's drollery compensates for a lot of dearie-me foolishness.

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