I'm sitting here with Stanley Donen's Blame It On Rio on TV. It's not as terrible as I remembered.
Michael Caine and Joe Bologna play a couple of friends working for a company in Brazil. They go to Rio de Janeiro on vacation with their teenage daughters. Bologna is in the middle of a divorce; Michael Caine's wife (Valerie Harper) leaves him while they're packing for the trip. In Rio, Bologna finds out that his daughter (Michelle Johnson) slept with a middle-aged man. He sets out to find out who it was not knowing that it was his best friend Caine.
Pauline Kael said the film was about incest in a disguised form. I don't quite agree with her, but it made me think about other movies. Like the 2013 movie Adore about two middle aged women who start sleeping with each other's college age son. Now THAT was a disguised incest movie.
It makes you wonder about Stanley Donen. He directed movies like Singin' in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Charade. Was this the sort of movie he REALLY wanted to make all those years or was he trying to keep up with the times?
It was probably Valerie Harper's biggest movie. With Demi Moore.
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