Honestly I didn’t like the story at all. The movie had other points in favor: Fred Astaire was getting old but was still his classy-self; Leslie Caron is lovely, she has a few beautiful dresses, the set design was very pretty and as it often happened in old movies, every shot seemed like a researched photograph, some of them even like an oil painting.
There’s a lot of dancing of course, and I don’t mind a good dance scene here and there, but sometimes some of them are too long…
The story is what I don’t like; not how it’s written, but the story in itself.
We meet Sir Jervis Pendleton the third, very very rich and quite eccentric, of course, playing the drum and singing whenever he likes.
He does his tip-tap dance at the beginning, then he has to go to France , and when the car stops he walks to the nearest place to ask for the use of a phone. The place is a orphanage, and he sees a girl with all the children, and takes an interest in her. He says he wants to adopt Julie Andre, but she’s 18 and that could be interpreted the wrong way, so instead he gives her an anonymous scholarship for a school in America. The only thing she knows about him is the address of a Mr John Smith, so she can write him a letter a month. The children who have vaguely seen him describe to her an old, very thin, tall and bald man wearing a hat, so she starts calling him Daddy Longlegs. She’s very excited; she goes to the American college and has a room with Linda Pendleton, his niece. He also sends her two trunks of clothes, since she has nothing with her. She writes to him and Mrs Pritchard reads all her letters and puts them in a file like Griggs told her to do. She longs for a reply that never comes, but never stops writing.
After more than two years, he has forgotten about her, but now Pritchard thinks it’s wrong to ignore her like that so Griggs speaks to him, intending for him to write to her. He makes a scene, until Jervis reads all the letters and makes a decision. Here there’s a long dance numbers, I didn’t really like this one (also, with the red boots he looked like a drag queen, and with the monocle and the mustache he reminded me of David Niven, but not enough, but then the guardian-angel dance was nice, with the two of them together, with him behind her helping and protecting her…)
After reading all the letters, he uses his niece Julie as an excuse to go to the college and see her, the same 20-year-old niece that he hasn’t seen since she was born, not even in pictures since he can’t recognize her at all.
:-/ He doesn’t really care about meeting her, instead he speaks to Julie and dances with her ( the song: “you make your right foot point to the north, you make your left foot point to the south..”) .
Back home, he keeps reading her letters, and sends away a boy to keep him away from her (again, saying that he wants to help the young man, but far far away from there), and he keeps using Linda as an excuse to see Julie, inviting them both to New York (and yet he invited only one of Linda’s roommates…) and then surprise, Linda can’t go, so Julie goes alone! … This 20-year-old girl goes alone to New York to meet the old uncle of her roommate… makes perfect sense… :-/
Finally a man says it like it is, that he is older and rich and he did everything he could to sweep her off her feet.. of course the poor orphan girl would be impressed!!
When she goes back to school, for some time they don’t see or hear from each other because he’s trying to stay away, but obviously she misses him (she has nobody else, her ‘guardian’ won’t reply to her letters and when they were together he took her dancing..)
There’s a long, long dance number, and then Julie writes again, and this time Mrs Pritchard feels for her a lot, and calls him back telling him that Griggs is terminally ill, because she wants the girl to meet her guardian.
At Julie’s graduation, Pritchard is there to congratulate her and tell her that she’s there to take her to meet her daddy-longlegs. Pritchard takes her to Jervis home and of course all is revealed (it’s enough for her to see the portraits on the wall). He asks her to meet him and they dance and kiss and it’s a happy ending…
supposedly, because the movie ends here and doesn’t show what will happen next, when of course she’ll start seeing a bit of world, and realize how much older he is, and maybe meet something she’ll really like… I’m not saying that there can’t be love if there’s an age difference, but come on: on one side a girl who’s been in an orphanage with children and a woman and the occasional farmer until she was 18, then in a school for four years, and so has seen very little of anything, and has for the most part only met the students who attended her school and nobody else; on the other side a man with experience and a lot of money to change her life, that takes her out in New York, he certainly knows how to make an impression… of course she misses that, she never had it, she never had anything… I wouldn’t call that love… (at least not yet; it might be, but it might not)
ITA Papà Gambalunga
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