Word: rio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BLAME IT ON RIO...
...Donen. The good one has for 35 years directed elegant entertainments like Singin' in the Rain, Charade, Two for the Road and Movie Movie. Every once in a while, though, his dark double appears and turns out something like Staircase or Lucky Lady and, now, Blame It on Rio. Inelegant is too mild a word for it; even distasteful doesn't quite cover it. Shall we say disgusting...
...plot has two businessmen, Matthew Hollis (Michael Caine) and Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna), their marriages in disarray, renting a house in Rio in order to share a vacation with their adolescent daughters. Whereupon Jennifer Lyons (Michelle Johnson, whose awkwardness may be attributed in part to the fact that she is a model rather than an actress and in part to the fact that she is required to do about half her scenes nude to the waist) seduces "Uncle Matthew." The joke-if the word can be applied here-is that she is cool and sophisticated, while he gets all flustered...
...capacity for turning sexual adventure into sexual folly, and a firm sense of values on the director's part. Farce, which must accept its characters on their own dumb or dizzy terms, is the wrong way to handle the dubious premise of a film like Blame It on Rio. It is too indelicate...
...Morality, to emulate his try for modest craftsmanship. It is dismaying to see them sell off comedy's right to social criticism in exchange for the chance to make soft-core porn. Perhaps that accounts for the dispirited and guilty air of a film that makes even Rio look ugly and cannot work up so much as an honest smirk over what it is doing. -By Richard Schickel