Smight Makes Right

I'd Rather Be Rich. There must be some mistake--this can't be a good movie. It was produced by Ross Hunter, a man who makes bad movies (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life) on principle--the principle that most moviegoers are housewives and most housewives don't care if the story is dull so long as the furniture is interesting. What's more, the picture stars Sandra Dee, a young woman who looks like everything the sociologists say is wrong with American teen-agers and acts as though she can't wait to get the picture over with and count her salary.

Nevertheless, Rich is a good movie--essentially because Producer Hunter hired a talented TV director named Jack Smight, and Smight makes right.

He makes, in fact, a continually lively and sometimes raucously hilarious situation comedy in which two hearty old-timers (Maurice Chevalier, Hermione Gingold) and two vigorous newcomers (Robert Goulet, Andy Williams) really bust up the producer's fancy furniture and even manage to make Sandra sometimes act like an actress instead of a sick kid with the Dee tease.

Sandra plays the granddaughter of a dying plutocrat (Chevalier) who insists on seeing her fiance before he "joins the Big Board up yonder." Since her fiance (Williams) is fogbound in Boston, Sandra seizes the first presentable passerby (Goulet) and tells her grandfather that this is the man she loves. Turns out he is, too, but it takes Sandra 95 minutes to find out she wasn't lying.

Chevalier is sly and charming as the invalid invalid. Gingold is pure gold as his nutty nurse, a suspicious spinster who sleeps with a large sheepdog in her bed and keeps giving her patient ambiguous invitations--"If you want a pill," she murmurs, "call me." Fast company, that, but Goulet somehow contrives to stay with the pace. And Williams, a young singer who looks like Bing Crosby and sounds like several other people, carries off the wackiest sequences in the picture.

"What a nice cabin," Andy murmurs to Sandra as they arrive for an assignation. But wait. The place has been booby-trapped by a buddy of Goulet's. When Andy opens the front door, a full-grown black bear strolls out. When the lovers sit on the couch, springs boing in all directions. When they start upstairs, the stairs collapse. When Andy lights a fire, the house fills up with smoke. When he runs to the well for water, the cap collapses, and he lands in the drink. When he tries to barbecue a chicken, flame shoots out of the bird's behind and whoosh! it takes off like a rocket.

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