The oddball pairing of Marlon Brando and David Niven works very well. They're con men on the Riviera who play a very funny game of oneupmanship as they con one rich woman after another. Things gets dicey when Shirley Jones shows up. Niven is great, but it's Brando (very much a stranger to comedy) who is hysterical. He really shows his comic range, whether he's acting like a helpless invalid or as Niven's phony feral brother. Though set in the south of France, this comedy has a very stylized studio feel to it thanks to director Ralph Levy. Levy, a veteran TV director (he worked on a lot of Jack Benny programs) keeps the pace moving and he's very much abetted by a clever script by 1960s high gloss experts Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning. Dodie Goodman & Marie Windsor pop up as two of the pair's unfortunate victims.
Review of Bedtime Story
