“They don’t make them like this anymore!” – That’s the tag line on the DVD box containing a splashy British film from 1964. The posters from the era proclaim, “The season’s most exciting cast . . . in the year’s most magnificent movie.” Well, no. Though the international cast is full of big names, excitement is definitely lacking. But The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a great example of how, in the advent of television, movie folk were desperate to use spectacle as a way to separate the big screen from the little ones in people’s living rooms.
The Yellow Rolls-Royce, written by famed British dramatist Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables) and directed by Anthony Asquith, is one of those compilation films that try to yoke together separate tales set in different locations and time frames by means of some sort of linking device. (A more recent example: 1998’s rather lugubrious The Red Violin). Here it’s a 1931 stretch limo, in gaudy yellow and black, that passes from owner to owner, from country to country. The real star of the film is undoubtedly that magnificent car, first seen being secretly conveyed through the streets of London to a posh dealership. There it’s spotted by a veddy wealthy British aristocrat (Rex Harrison), who quibbles about the placement of its back-seat telephone, but snaps it up as an anniversary gift for his beloved wife.
What he doesn’t know is that this wife (a young Jeanne Moreau), having tired of life among the British swells, has found herself a handsome young functionary with whom to canoodle. Naturally, the yellow Rolls-Royce plays a role in their assignations. (It has roll-down window shades that come in very handy under the circumstances.) There’s a mournful, but by no means tragic, ending to their story, at which point the car is quickly returned to the dealer.
After the bittersweet tone of Story #1, we move on to Italy, where after many presumed adventures with owners from diverse lands, the Rolls is acquired in Genoa by a Miami mobster played by the unlikely George C. Scott, who seems to be having a ball speaking in dems and doses. His sidekick is the always welcome Art Carney, and his blonde-bimbo fiancée is none other than Shirley MacLaine. She falls for street photographer/gigolo-in-training Alain Delon, but ultimately recognizes on which side her focaccia is buttered. Of course the Rolls figures into the story.
Story #3 plays out in 1941, on the border between Trieste and Yugoslavia. A mega-wealthy and mega-powerful American, played by Ingrid Bergman, buys the yellow Rolls, although it has clearly seen better days. Determined to motor into Yugoslavia to visit her friend the president, she blithely ignores the very real threat of a Nazi takeover. At first she seems tragically naïve, but when a Yugoslav partisan (Omar Sharif) begs her to transport him back to his country in the boot of the Rolls, she blossoms into a fierce defender of Yugoslav freedom.—and into the earnest, patriotic Bergman we know and love from films like Casablanca.
This third segment definitely has the most meat to it; it’s also the only one of the tales in which a central character grows and changes. Otherwise, these are mostly interesting stories that didn’t much capture the hearts of the viewing public. The whole impetus for the Yellow Rolls-Royce was The VIPs, a highly successful all-star film from the same production team. That flick, set at Heathrow Airport, featured Taylor and Burton at the height of their celebrity, along with Maggie Smith, Orson Welles, and others. But not, I believe, a single Rolls-Royce.
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