The Notorious Landlady Reviews

The pedigree is strong with The Notorious Landlady, but the final product doesn’t add up to much of anything. The pacing is lacking, the production values are strangely muted, and the star power is either miscast or gone to waste.

Director Richard Quine’s 1950s comedy output was never lacking in energy or imagination, with Operation Mad Ball and Bell Book and Candle being prime examples of his best work of the period. But the moment the 60s hit, something went off with his work. The Notorious Landlady is symptomatic of his later work, pacing issues abound, emphasis is placed in weird spots of the narrative and development, and the performances are just routine.

I wonder if Blake Edwards taking the directing chores would have produced something better. His Pink Panther films clearly take their outline from his script for this, and maybe he could have reassembled some of the odder choices into something more coherent. The final act change, where the pacing goes from deliberately slow to all out slapstick farce, feels too disjointed from the rest of the film to work. Maybe Edwards would have found the jokes throughout the film, as so much of the first 2/3 of the film is heavy on the talk, exposition, and light on laughs.

Jack Lemmon tries to make the laughs bubble up, but it’s all for not. Fred Astaire is wasted, but does what he can with the thinly written role. Estelle Winwood and Lionel Jeffries fare better in small roles, providing a few moments of dry British wit. Then there’s Kim Novak, who seems entirely sleepy here with the ambiguous role collapsing the longer the film goes on. It takes a stronger hand to get comedy out of her, but she wasn’t incapable of it, but she’s obviously uncomfortable with the sex siren scenarios at play here.

It’s not that The Notorious Landlady is a complete bore, but it teeters very close to that edge. Much better movies take a similar ground, so a blueprint was there, but I put much of the blame purely on Quine’s shoulders. He could better than this, and Lemmon, Astaire, and Novak deserved better than this.