Little Boy Bluebeard

Arrivederci, Baby! Across the screen on twinkle toes comes skipping one of the cutest little velveteen-agers the public has seen since Freddie Bartholomew turned contralto. He has big brown eyes and pretty brown bangs, and in that silly-frilly Little Lord Fauntleroy suit he doesn't look a day over twelve. He does look familiar, though. No, it can't be--Tony Curtis?

Yes it can. In this mockabre and occasionally hilarious comedy written and directed by Britain's Ken Hughes, Tony plays a Little Boy Bluebeard who just naturally grows up to be a lady-killer.

Victim No. 1 is a wealthy widow (Anna Quayle) who consoles herself by bawling the Kashmiri Song ("Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar/ Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway far?") while she somehow makes her harp sound like a bedspring banged with a coal scuttle. Before long teeny Tony, her stepson and heir, just can't face the music. So he runs a wire from his toy-train set to the frame of the harp, transforming it into a colossal toaster that does stepmother up brown.

Victim No. 2 is Wife No. 1 (Zsa Zsa Gabor), the jet-set jabbernaught Tony meets and marries when he grows out of short pants. With rocks on her fingers and rocks in her head, she gives Tony two months of Gaboredom until one day he leaves her locked in the capsule of a space rocket that promptly becomes the world's first guided Mrssile.

And so on, till in Victim No. 4 (Rosanna Schiaffino), phony Tony meets a mankiller who shows him how two can die as cheaply as one. By that time, unfortunately, the joke has gone on too long, and the spectator is left with a somewhat unnerving realization: at 41, Curtis seems most at home in his scenes as Little Lord Fauntleroy.

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