Word: niven
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...Cross charity gala in Monte Carlo, such celebrities as the Begum Aga Khan and Cinemactor David Niven were nicely sprinkled amidst 1,000 unknowns who paid $75 to dance and watch the Bluebell Girls of Paris prance. To the sprinkle, hélas, was added a spatter and then a downpour. The Prince looked a trifle Rainier than usual, but Princess Grace, 34, remained smilingly in place to the end of the show. Noblesse was scarcely obliged to make so gracious a gesture-what with a third addition to the royal family due in Monaco next February...
...pair of usually wide-awake Hollywood pitchmen. This time out, Producer-Writer Stanley Shapiro (Lover Come Back, That Touch of Mink) and Co-Author Paul Henning have pitched a Mickey to the comic muse. Story unfolds against rear-projection views of the Riviera, where a bogus Highness (David Niven) and an ex-U.S. Army corporal (Marlon Brando) pool their resources to squeeze a living out of wealthy women such as Dody Goodman, an Omaha madcap just born to be trimmed. The thieves fall out, of course, when they begin vying for the love and money of pretty Shirley Jones...
...Niven alone survives disaster by coasting through the film ever so lightly. Early on, before the first fissures appear, he issues a nimble challenge to his costar: "Are you proposing to pit your crude animal instincts against intelligence, culture and breeding?" Unfortunately Brando answers yes, then lumbers on to demonstrate how a potentially great talent can petrify through miscasting and misuse. In one scene he attempts to seduce the mayor's daughter by performing a squalid striptease. Later, posing as a mentally defective prince, he gibbers like a traumatized gorilla and has to be spoon-fed. Then, pretending...
...movie has Claudia Cardinale, spilling out of her role as the Indian princess who owns a coveted teardrop diamond dubbed the "Pink Panther." It has David Niven as the thief, resurrecting his Raffles characterization of 1940. It has Robert Wagner as Niven's ne'er-do-well nephew, who seems to have been shoehorned into the narrative to appease the young. It has Capucine in the role of Sellers' wife, giving a surprisingly able performance as a knockabout comedienne. And it has a pervasive air of desperation that leads to the inevitable masked-ball finale in Rome...
...early nudged toward the diplomatic corps. At 16, he interrupted Sunday dinner to announce himself an actor. His half-Dutch father shouted half-Dutch expletives, finally conceded that the boy could have two years to get solvent as an actor, but no more. So Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven Van den Bogaerde went down to London...