An easy, breezy remake of the Shirley Temple vehicle "Little Miss Marker", the movie was produced by its star Tony Curtis, playing a role tailored for him.....a dashing, slicker-than-oil Lake Tahoe casino manager, a champion schmoozer, fixer and casual playboy....
Curtis does have his problems, though......he's something of an OCD neat freak and dares to cross over the Nevada borderline into California only at his peril, pursued there by his vengeful ex-wife's army of lawyers and process servers....
His newest woes include two girls of varied ages.....a beautiful lounge singer (Suzanne Pleshette) forced on him by the casino's gangster owner (Phil Silvers).....and a little girl (Claire Wilcox) abandoned at the casino by her compulsive gambler father. (Setting up the gag where the sloppy tot horrifies the fussy Curtis by leaving wet towels strewn about his immaculate bathroom...)
That's about all that's worth describing here until this movie arrives at its whole reason for existence.....Curtis risks an excursion to California to take the tyke to Disneyland, with Pleshette along as a chaperone. The ex-wife and her legal minions get wind of it and soon a mad, scenic, slapstick dash across the famous theme park ensues, taking up what seems like half the film's running time....
Loads of fun to watch and a colorful, extended commercial for the park, but we thought it odd that Uncle Walt, who virtually invented multi-media cross promotion, would allow a rival movie studio access to the crown jewel of his empire. We can 't imagine why Disney wouldn't have thrown a Disneyland chase into one of his own comedies(such as "The Shaggy Dog"), rather than let it grace a Universal movie. But then again, Norman Jewison, just starting a long, celebrated directing career, does as good a job as any Disney in-house director turning the park into a comic obstacle course.....
One truly 'whoa' moment to mention....(or a 'WTF', as you wild 'n crazy Internet kids would say....)....Curtis, Pleshette and little Wilcox evade their pursuers by donning full rubber masks of JFK, Fidel Castro and Nikita Krushchev........say what? Did they really sell those at the Disneyland gift shop??. (We'd dreamily imagine a re-make where the three leads race through EPCOT disguised as Trump, Putin and Rodrigo Duterte.....the three Amigos.)
A more innocent movie for a more innocent time.....which the BQ always loves to return to, especially when the horrors and absurdities of this day and age stagger the imagination. We'll weigh out 3 stars for '40 Pounds Of Trouble' (***)........an amusing little trifle that gets a lot mileage out of its visit to the happiest place on earth.....
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