Cinema: Pink Baggage on the Riviera

Love Is a Ball reaches way back to those zany rich-girl-marries-chauffeur comedies of the ’30s for its plot. To give Ball new bounce, Director David Swift (The Parent Trap] has transferred the action to the Riviera, hustled in a bagful of props: a pink yacht with matching luggage, a custard-cake skyscraper for dessert, a floating baby grand for the pool. But to keep this kind of souffle inflated is primarily up to a bubbly blonde. Hope Lange. She is the chauffeur-chasing American heiress who keeps a sports-car engine in her bedroom, a collection of slinky bizarrities in her closet. To go auto racing with Chauffeur Glenn Ford, she slips into a pink bareback space suit; for alfresco breakfasting, Hope is a thing with feathers —blue ostrich plumes on a polka-dot peignoir. She has awful manners: she stirs her champagne with Ford’s toothbrush—and licks it. But she shapes up when she lures him to an erotic booby trap of an island hideaway, with dozens of marble nymphs and satyrs and only one bed.

Adding just the right whiff of Gallic is indestructible Charles Boyer, a delight to watch as he runs a school for would-be grooms, whose current pupil is Ricardo Montalban, the runner-up in the match for Hope’s millions. High point in Boyer’s my-fair-laddie crash course: instruction by the master himself in the art of nibbling an arm (“The elbow is a very nice place, and from there it is all good”). Backgrounds of the Grande Corniche are getting to be a grand cliché in movies nowadays, and Ball’s scenario has more twists and turns than the Grand Prix. But it also has its moments, among them a magnificently foppish performance by erstwhile Television Heavy Telly Savalas. As for Glenn Ford, he is in the driver’s seat all the way.