The Notorious Landlady (1962)

January 7, 2025 10:12 AM

Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, and Fred Astaire star as American characters in early sixties London, navigating a murder mystery, a budding romance, and potential embarrassment to the US Embassy. Lemmon later confided, the romance-comedy-mystery film "had so many twists and turns I couldn't follow it. A couple of years ago it came on television and I sat through it again and still couldn't get a handle on it. I delivered lines in that picture with absolute conviction - and I haven't the faintest idea to this day what they meant." Currently streaming for free on Tubi in the US.
posted by brainwane (1 comment total)

My spouse and I enjoyed the ride with this one - it's a pleasure to watch the leads, there's fun banter, the plot just does not go where we expected at the pace we expected, and the whole shape of the last 40 minutes or so surprised us.

And -- maybe this is influenced by the other stuff I've been watching -- I just enjoyed watching people try to navigate a strange situation sensibly, sometimes at odds with each other, but not very foolishly. Every deception is for a reason, and the only huge suspension of disbelief I had to take care of was "Kim Novak's character is so magnetically appealing to at least 2 men that they instantly fall for her and take up her cause". Which is practically a genre convention, really.
posted by brainwane at 10:17 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]