Blame It on the Bellboy Reviews

Labored zaniness results when three men with similar names but very different missions check into the same Venice hotel at the same time in BLAME IT ON THE BELLBOY. In his feature debut, writer-director Mark Herman tries to revive the biting spirit of vintage British farce with tepid results. Timid clerk Melvyn Orton (Dudley Moore) is in town to dispose of some of his mean boss's (director Lindsay Anderson, heard over the phone but never seen) money on a rundown villa as a tax shelter. Corpulent, married, small-town mayor Maurice Horton (Richard Griffiths), meanwhile, is in town to cheat on his wife with a computer-arranged travel date, Patricia Fulford (Penelope Wilton). Rounding out the trio, Mike Lawton (Bryan Brown) is a hitman in town to kill a local gangster, Scarpa (Andreas Katsulas). Thanks to a bellboy (Bronson Pinchot) whose English pronunciation leaves much to be desired, Horton winds up meeting a sexy real estate agent, Caroline Wright (Patsy Kensit), whom he believes to be his date, and Orton winds up trying to buy a villa from the gangster, while Lawton stalks Horton's date, believing her to be his "contract." It becomes easy to predict where the action goes from there. After much running around, Horton winds up buying the villa, blackmailed by the agent after Horton's wife, Rosemary (Alison Steadman), nearly walks in on them in bed. Orton winds up stealing the money he was supposed to have used to buy the villa, after inadvertently blowing up the gangster. Lawton collects the money earned by Orton and runs away with Horton's date, with whom he has fallen in love. By naming one of his lead characters after late British playwright Joe Orton (whose own life story was the subject of Stephen Frears's film PRICK UP YOUR EARS), Herman invites comparison between his efforts here and the late master of British farce. But it's not a comparison that would have much point. Herman keeps his main characters separate for too long, necessitating extended frantic crosscutting that continues long after it has ceased to amuse. It was also a mistake to film on location in Venice. The best farces are staged in as small a space as possible--which is what makes the genre perfect for the stage and problematic for the screen--the more claustrophobic the better, to increase the comic tension. Here, the eerie, formidable beauty of Venice distracts from, rather than enhances, the action. More importantly, BLAME IT ON THE BELLBOY comes to feel more and more coyly sanitized as it goes on, as if Herman were creating not a real British farce, but an incredible simulation, purposefully blunted and tamed for American consumption. It overemphasizes the punishment of the "bad" characters and the reward of the "good" characters--down to an end credit roll that seems almost as long as the film itself--precisely when a craftier writer (like Orton, whose writing was fueled by a truly corrosive wit) would be tightening the screws and making his audience squirm. At least the performances are generally good. Even Moore is tolerable this time out, and most of the British veterans--Griffiths, Wilton and Steadman especially--give good, solid comedy performances. But it all comes down to the sum being much less than the individual parts. Despite sharing a producer (Steve Abbott) with the much funnier A FISH CALLED WANDA, BLAME IT ON THE BELLBOY accomplishes little beyond making lust, greed and murder seem extraordinarily dull subjects for a comedy. (Violence, profanity, adult situations.)