Father Goose (1964)

(On TV, July 2021) By the mid 1960s, sixty-something Cary Grant was seriously contemplating retirement. Having played romantic leads for the near entirety of his career and unwilling to change by taking on supporting or non-romantic roles, his options were getting more limited and his on-screen partners increasingly ludicrous. Leslie Caron, for instance, was 27 years his junior when shooting Father Goose — while the film (his penultimate) doesn’t necessarily look like a romantic comedy in its first half, the second quickly reverts to form, as his crusty beachcomber protagonist eventually marries the schoolteacher in desperate circumstances just to, ahem, goose up the film’s tension. It’s a shame, because the first half does a few interesting things — chiefly by taking Grant out of a suit and into a scraggly alcoholic hermit’s role, manipulated by acquaintances into contributing to the Allied resistance against the Japanese on the Pacific front. Grant’s charming mumbling remains as entertaining as ever, and the script is ingenious in contriving an interesting situation when eight schoolgirls and their caretaker disrupt his new routine. It’s afterwards that Father Goose gets far more conventional at a breakneck speed. While there are a few worthwhile moments (including a very funny response to a schoolgirl getting a crush on a sixty-year-old man), the film seems so preoccupied in creating, advancing and resolving the romance between Grant and Caron’s character that this only highlights its artificiality. Oh, Grant is his usual compelling self, and Caron looks better than in other movies with longer hair. The interplay between the two is not bad, and the screenplay does hit its mark. I’m probably being overly critical of the film — a Cary Grant film is worth a look even when it doesn’t hit the heights of the rest of his filmography. Still, Father Goose does demonstrate why Grant retired when he did, rather than take on roles that diminished his persona.