Sitting Pretty (1948)

Directed by Walter Lang

Time for a comedy for our Film of the Week, and one of my father’s favorites, too! The week’s touchstone, birthday, puts me in mind of the zaniness that families with little kids so often get used to, when if you’d told them beforehand that that’s what they’d have to deal with, they might have run away from the altar as fast as they could. Oh, I’m only teasing, of course. If the truth be known, a lot of parents look forward to the mischief and merriment they themselves will get to enjoy with the children — and even, sure, helping them to a bit of merriment now and then that they’d not have thought of on their own, as when I’d dance around the floor grabbing toddler Davey by both hands and swinging him for glee, as Luciano Pavarotti sang what was then Davey’s favorite, “Funiculi, Funicula!”

But what do you do when you’ve got three very little boys and a dog, and they get into a lot of scrapes, and you’ve gone through a string of nannies who can’t last more than a week? In our film, the young lawyer Harry King (Robert Young, who will later have three other kids in the hugely underrated comedy show Father Knows Best) puts an ad in the paper, and hires, unseen, a new nanny named Lynn Belvedere. But much to his surprise, and it’s no less of a surprise to his wife Tacey (Maureen O'Hara), Lynn Belvedere turns out to be a middle-aged man, who doesn’t even like children. Or so he says. To say that Mr. Belvedere is unusual is the understatement of the century. “May I ask what your profession is?” asks Mrs. King when she shows Mr. Belvedere his room. “Certainly,” he replies. “I am a genius.”

Mr. Belvedere is played by Clifton Webb, the perfect fellow for the role: intelligent, fussy, witty, sometimes acidulous, but always with a sneaky humor about him. How can he possibly tame the boys and their dog? How can he get the toddler Roddy to stop flinging his oatmeal when he’s at table? But when you see Mr. Belvedere, the question is rather the reverse: how can he not do it, or rather how can the boys resist his brains and his determined and deadpan playfulness? And what’s he doing anyway in this little suburb with the absurd name, Hummingbird Hill? Why did he reply to the ad? He doesn’t need the money. He’s been all over the world. “Is there anything you haven’t been?” asks Mrs. King, breathless with amazement. “Yes,” says Mr. Belvedere, with that dry matter-of-fact hilarity. “I’ve never been an idler or a parasite.”

Of course there’s got to be trouble, because what’s comedy without trouble? In this film, it’s provided by the human foibles of snoopiness, hasty judgment, and wanting to put on a good show in front of other people. The town’s snoop, and also the town’s biggest gossip, is the Kings’ neighbor, Mr. Appleton (Richard Haydn; you’ll remember him as the impresario “Uncle” Max in The Sound of Music). Then there’s Harry’s boss at the law office, Horatio Hammond (Ed Begley, Sr.; see him as a good man whose day has passed, in Patterns). Mr. Hammond gets nervous when the silly gossip goes around Hummingbird Hill that Mr. Belvedere is more than just a nanny for Mrs. King. Even Harry ends up suspicious for a while. That the suspicion is absurd doesn’t compromise the comedy, because the whole film dances merrily along the border of absurdity, without however making us doubt that a creature such as Mr. Belvedere could exist.

In a lot of American humor — think of The Three Stooges — the joke is on the upper-class snobs, but here the snob is the source of all the humor, and the joke is on the rest of us silly people who now and then take ourselves too seriously. We’re like the awful bust of Nero that the Kings put in the room they’ve set up for the nanny they think they’re going to get, because, after all, it would be good to show the nanny that they’re people of culture, and maybe some of it will rub off on her. The bust of Nero is however the first thing Mr. Belvedere gets rid of. And that too is part of the genius of this film — we can go from the wild romp of physical comedy to a subtle wink of the eye at human folly, our own folly.

My father thought Clifton Webb was first-rate, and he was right about that. Jay Ward and his fellow creators of that zany cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show thought so too, which is why they modeled the bespectacled talking dog, Mr. Peabody, the genius with advanced degrees in everything from everywhere, after Mr. Belvedere. If you enjoy this film, check him out also in Mr. Belvedere Goes to College and Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell.

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