Mama Steps Out

The Battle of the Villa Fiorita.

"Something binding, inescapable, unforgettable has happened to me," confesses lovely Maureen O'Hara.

"In two months?" inquires her diplomat husband (Richard Todd). Just back from a trip, Todd finds everything at sixes and sevens in his English country home. His wife--pointedly identified as the mother of his children, lest there be some mistake--has been participating in the local arts festival rather more enthusiastically than anyone planned. Her pet project is a famous Italian composer-pianist (Rossano Brazzi). The two look at one another, and the sound track booms concerti. On a chain around her neck Maureen wears the gold medal Brazzi won at the festival, a clue that her course in music appreciation has advanced beyond the hand-holding stage.

In this lushly produced, smoothly vulgarized adaptation of a 1963 novel by Rumer Godden, effusions like "binding, inescapable, unforgettable" are as common as teacups at a Wednesday bridge luncheon. But breathless rhetoric apparently is the norm for sensible English matrons who desert home and family to live in guilty splendor with pianists on the shores of Italy's Lago di Garda. Maureen and Rossano have no sooner snuggled into his sumptuous Villa Fiorita than her pint-sized son and daughter (Martin Stephens, Elizabeth Dear) arrive. They have paid their fare to Italy by selling the girl's pet pony, but they fully intend to put Mama back in harness. Soon they are joined by Brazzi's convent-bred daughter (Olivia Hussey) who has the same idea.

Villa Fiorita becomes a battleground so fraught with emotional crises that Director Delmer Daves, from the sound of things, must have hired extra musicians to bring pathos to a crescendo. The kids scheme, pray, go on a hunger strike, and occasionally throw up as part of a campaign that Brazzi decries as "legally and morally wrong." But children know best: in such strained and saccharine circumstances, a touch of nausea is inevitable.

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