How do you take a story about a romance, multiply it by three, and make it one of the most uninteresting love stories in recent memory? The answer is in the structure itself. By cramming in three full romance stories into a relatively short runtime, you give inadequate time to each of them and have a film filled with poorly developed characters that we just don’t grow to care for. This is a case of too many stories running concurrently and muddying up the waters. Any of these three stories could have made for an interesting story on their own; the three intertwined, however, overwhelm the film and leaves it a bit of a disappointment overall.
The movie follows three American women working in Rome, Italy. The first of these is Maria Williams (Maggie McNamara), who has just arrived in the country to take over a position from Anita Hutchins (Jean Peters) at the United States Distribution Agency. The two women drive to the Villa Eden, which Anita shares with a third woman, Miss Frances (Dorothy McGuire), the longtime secretary of American author John Frederick Shadwell (Clifton Webb), an expatriate living in Rome. On their way into town, the three women stop by the Trevi Fountain, where Frances and Anita tell Maria that if she throws a coin into the fountain and makes a wish to return to Rome someday, then the wish will come true. Maria and Frances do just that, but Anita refrains, stating that she is planning to return to America to marry and doesn’t want to return to Rome.
Anita takes Maria to the agency to introduce her around. There she meets Giorgio Bianchi (Rossano Brazzi), a translator. Maria, sensing an attraction between Anita and Giorgio, teases her about it. Anita responds by stating that the agency forbids fraternizing between employees. Later that same evening, Maria is attending a party and is smitten by Prince Dino di Cessi (Louis Jourdan), despite warnings that he is a womanizer who often takes women on his personal plane to Venice for romantic getaways. Dino charms Maria, telling her to ignore the rumors.
Anita confesses that she actually has no fiancé and that the real reason she is leaving Rome is because there have been no opportunities here for her to marry. The men in Rome are either too poor or have no interest in women of her social standing. Despite her determination to leave, she reluctantly accepts an offer from Giorgio to attend a celebration with him at his family’s country farm. Maria sets out to learn all of Dino’s preferences from music to food and then uses this information to keep him attracted to her. Anita finds herself unable to resist the charms of Giorgio, which jeopardizes his chances of chasing his dreams to be a lawyer, and Miss Francis finds herself engaged to Shadwell, who is also leaving Rome for America. But when he discovers he has a terminal illness, he abruptly calls off the engagement.
This film is tonally all over the place. The moments between Maria and Dino feel like a comedy of errors, something akin to something Rock Hudson and Doris Day would have been in. But, whereas in one of those films the situation would be exaggerated to aid the comedic elements. Here, the humor of the whole setup is so tamped down that it loses sight of it, coming across more mild than it needed to be. The best part of this storyline is when Dino takes Maria to see his mother and Maria has to bluff her way through the meeting, pretending to be someone she is not. The same tonal issues go for the moments when Anita visits Giorgio’s family. We get some broad comedy around a beaten-up car with no functional brakes, but these moments feel out of place when placed side-by-side with the downbeat plot of him losing his opportunity to make something of himself.
The worst offender, though, is the third story. Miss Frances has decided to flee back to America because she is afraid of becoming an old maid. She has been in love with her employer, Shadwell, for fifteen years now but has never made her feelings known to him. When he find sout why she is leaving, he offers her a marriage of convenience to keep her in Rome. At first, she accepts, but his discovery that he has but a year left to live changes all of that. This plot-line is so melodramatic and dour that it feels out of place amongst all the rest of the stories. There’s an attempt at levity when Shadwell goes to a bar and tries to order a bottle of scotch, settling on six double shots when the restaurant tells him they don’t sell it by the bottle. Frances, having found out about the diagnosis, joins him and ends up ordering another six shots for herself, convincing the staff that there must be something going on to merit multiple people ordering that specific number of shots. It’s trying for humor and missing the mark.
The main reason to see this movie anymore is for the cinematography. This film was made entirely in Italy during the “Hollywood on the Tiber” era. It showcases the country well and presents it in a way that would attract audiences to want to pay it a visit. The Trevi Fountain in particular gets featured well, showcasing why it is one of the most famous fountains in the world. It also serves as the setting for an uncredited Frank Sinatra song that would go on to be a staple of his, the title song: Three Coins in the Fountain. This is a beautiful film to look at in all aspects. Even the country scenes take advantage of the locale to show us glimpses of the classic Italian architecture in the backgrounds, never letting us forget just where we are at all times.
But we are not watching this film for a travelogue of Italy. There are plenty of those if all you want to see is the landscapes and architecture. As a film, this one falls short in the compelling story department primarily because it tries too hard to give us three complete stories in a short runtime. By doing so, none of them have enough time to breathe, and that makes for an uninteresting film overall. It really is too bad, too, because the six leads are all doing their best with a script that just doesn’t feature them very well. This film doesn’t have repeatability and, because of that, it becomes one of those films that is often forgotten when considering the Academy Award-nominated best pictures.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Sol C. Siegel
Best Cinematography: Milton Krasner (won)
Best Original Song: “Three Coins in the Fountain” Music by Jule Styne and Lyrics by Sammy Cahn (won)
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Release Date: May 20, 1954
Running Time: 102 Minutes
Not Rated
Starring: Clifton Webb, Dorothy McGuire, Jean Peters, Louis Jourdan, Maggie McNamara, Rossano Brazzi, Howard St. John, Kathryn Givney, and Cathleen Nesbitt
Directed By: Jean Negulesco
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