This is really a very funny movie indeed.
It is conventional in that the setting is an aptly-named picture-box small, white-painted, though gossipy, town, full of middle ranking executives and professionals bringing up their families and providing competently for their spouses (well, wives, really). Unconventional in that absolutely the most extraordinary character suddenly implants himself into the situation with immediate and transforming effect. Something like this happens in reverse when Sheridan Whiteside lands the wrong way up on the doorstep of Mr and Mrs Ernest Stanley in "The Man who came to Dinner". The direction wisely delays the principal character's entry for some time and it takes at least some nerve to do this but it works brilliantly here.
Clifton Webb manages to be both seriously comic and comically serious at the same time and there is genius in that ability. It is entirely credible that the quite sparky children rapidly take to Lynn Belvedere, no matter how often they are reproved by him.
Other reviewers have set out the story well enough that it need not be rehashed here, but what stands out in Clifton Webb's brilliantly iconoclastic performance (I mean that the class of personages known usually as babysitters does, apparently, contain a subset marked "other") is the way in which he simply makes himself fit in, not only to Robert Young's noisy family, but into this movie itself in an artistic sense. Webb's character is more than outrageous, but not for a moment do the other characters in the film, nor we, actually draw the line and (r)eject him. It's a great achievement, indeed.
He does have the able assistance of the British actor Richard Haydn, as the snoopy adenoidal neighbour, who is also tremendously entertaining on screen, both vocally and with several excellent visual gags at the ready. Haydn and Webb do use the movie to prove that the screen is too small for the both of 'em and the rest of the cast thus bounce off them gleefully whenever either or both are playing a scene.
The Mr Belvedere character was subtly used in two sequels to "Sitting Pretty" which both explore its creative and dramatic valency in quite satisfyingly different ways.
Nothing wrong with "Sitting Pretty" at all, and everything right: one is left on something of a high for several days.
It is conventional in that the setting is an aptly-named picture-box small, white-painted, though gossipy, town, full of middle ranking executives and professionals bringing up their families and providing competently for their spouses (well, wives, really). Unconventional in that absolutely the most extraordinary character suddenly implants himself into the situation with immediate and transforming effect. Something like this happens in reverse when Sheridan Whiteside lands the wrong way up on the doorstep of Mr and Mrs Ernest Stanley in "The Man who came to Dinner". The direction wisely delays the principal character's entry for some time and it takes at least some nerve to do this but it works brilliantly here.
Clifton Webb manages to be both seriously comic and comically serious at the same time and there is genius in that ability. It is entirely credible that the quite sparky children rapidly take to Lynn Belvedere, no matter how often they are reproved by him.
Other reviewers have set out the story well enough that it need not be rehashed here, but what stands out in Clifton Webb's brilliantly iconoclastic performance (I mean that the class of personages known usually as babysitters does, apparently, contain a subset marked "other") is the way in which he simply makes himself fit in, not only to Robert Young's noisy family, but into this movie itself in an artistic sense. Webb's character is more than outrageous, but not for a moment do the other characters in the film, nor we, actually draw the line and (r)eject him. It's a great achievement, indeed.
He does have the able assistance of the British actor Richard Haydn, as the snoopy adenoidal neighbour, who is also tremendously entertaining on screen, both vocally and with several excellent visual gags at the ready. Haydn and Webb do use the movie to prove that the screen is too small for the both of 'em and the rest of the cast thus bounce off them gleefully whenever either or both are playing a scene.
The Mr Belvedere character was subtly used in two sequels to "Sitting Pretty" which both explore its creative and dramatic valency in quite satisfyingly different ways.
Nothing wrong with "Sitting Pretty" at all, and everything right: one is left on something of a high for several days.