Three Coins in the Fountain is the standard location shoot from the fifties. We get expensive, widescreen photography (Italy - very nice), but the minute we enter an interior (or a character gets in a car) we're in an artificial world of soundstages. This becomes the defacto formula for 50s travelogue/dramas. The movie itself would fall under the heading "chick flick," a term of assignation, for a genre that generally offers only sisterhood beset by minor conflicts; and women either short-changing their own lives and development for a man (the 50s), or defining themselves via quasi-rejecting some social norm (the 80s forward). To be sure, there are chick flicks that can be enjoyed by general audiences (Terms of Endearment) but the term is characteristically used to deservedly dismiss trifling story lines like this one.
Three women are explained to be in Italy for various reasons, and become room-mates. As the time demands, they're absurd, but true period types who use the steno-pool to travel, have an income, and find eligible bachelors whom they agree never to compete with; women whose truncated education (and society's glass ceiling) insure that they can't. Additionally, improbably, they live like queens.
The movies wide-screen compositions are handsome but the story is off the low end of the scale for inconsequence. The script writers can't be bothered to spare four lines to introduce the piece's major conflict. Here a stenographer is such a dense bimbo that she a) inexplicably reveals a roommates transgressions to her boss, and b) forgets to inform her, causing job loss for her boyfriend and embarrassment for the room-mate. It's just too darned hard for this pretty thing to understand that she's both been outmaneuvered, AND done something very unethical, even within the terms of the movie. The movie notes none of this. The same character has an unexplored conflict in her desire to win a guy, but to also reap benefits (travel, etc.) from delaying or denying the onset of his romantic or sexual interest. The movie is a bewildering gender-power study.
Three women are explained to be in Italy for various reasons, and become room-mates. As the time demands, they're absurd, but true period types who use the steno-pool to travel, have an income, and find eligible bachelors whom they agree never to compete with; women whose truncated education (and society's glass ceiling) insure that they can't. Additionally, improbably, they live like queens.
The movies wide-screen compositions are handsome but the story is off the low end of the scale for inconsequence. The script writers can't be bothered to spare four lines to introduce the piece's major conflict. Here a stenographer is such a dense bimbo that she a) inexplicably reveals a roommates transgressions to her boss, and b) forgets to inform her, causing job loss for her boyfriend and embarrassment for the room-mate. It's just too darned hard for this pretty thing to understand that she's both been outmaneuvered, AND done something very unethical, even within the terms of the movie. The movie notes none of this. The same character has an unexplored conflict in her desire to win a guy, but to also reap benefits (travel, etc.) from delaying or denying the onset of his romantic or sexual interest. The movie is a bewildering gender-power study.