User Reviews

I find it quite surprising seeing that Cary Grant is one of my favourite actors, that after nearly forty reviews on this site not one of them has been a Cary Grant film. How odd.

I now intend to remedy that fact by posting a few as I do believe he was one of the most versatile performers and gifted comedy actors ever to hit our screens.

My favourite Cary Grant comedy is 1937's The Awful Truth and it is an amazing tribute to his talent that in Father Goose made 27 years later, he seems to have aged very little and has not lost one iota of the spark or zest that graced his performances throughout the decades.

In his penultimate screen appearance, Grant for once plays a character far removed from his immaculately dressed man about town persona as he takes on the role of Walter Eckland a south sea drifter complete with dirty slacks, tennis shoes and beard. Life for Eckland is lived on his beloved boat, drinking scotch and sailing from island to island meeting and fraternising with as fewer people as possible.

However Eckland's idealistic lifestyle (and the hull of his boat) are severely destroyed with the arrival of Captain Trevor Howard of the Royal Navy. Bullied, brow-beaten, bribed with Scotch Whiskey and with a large gaping hole in his boat, he is forced onto a deserted pacific island to act as coast watcher for the Allies, reporting Japanese ship and aeroplane activities with the R/T codename of Mother Goose.

Eckland's immediate plans are to repair his boat and escape his captivity, and jumps at the chance to go and rescue a possible replacement from a nearby island. Using his boat's dinghy he braves rough seas and Japanese patrol vessels in order to obtain his freedom.

However, when he arrives at the island he finds the replacement dead and a prim and proper governess, played by Leslie Caron, in his stead. It is only after he agrees to take her off the island to safety that life goes from bad to worse as it appears she is not travelling alone, but with seven schoolgirls.

The interplay between Grant,Caron and the kids is hilarious, as the contrast of lifestyles between Walter and his reluctant family is immediately apparent and almost at once they become warring factions.

She wastes no time in confiscating and hiding his liquor, evicting him from his house, and commandeering his clothes, his tools, his food and just about everything else she can get her hands on.

Walter is more or less banished to his half submerged boat. A stranger in his own 'home'.

None the less after near discovery by the Japanese, Eckland acts heroically endearing him at last to the female inhabitants, until eventually the 'rude, drunken, foul mouthed, filthy beast' and 'Miss Goodie-two-shoes' actually become rather 'pally'.

The whole cast is excellent, most notably Trevor Howard, who really relishes this rare chance to take on a comedic role, but what makes this film sensational is the clever writing.

For example when the Navy is given the task of evacuating the newcomers, the answer is a parachute drop:- "A parachute drop? I want them picked up Frank, not put down". Or when Grant is teaching Caron how to fish:- "Quiet, here she comes again"..... "How do you know it is a she?" asks Caron..... "Her mouth is open, now be quiet."

Very witty examples and this film is chock-a-block full of them. Check out the snake-bite scene. It is quite amazing.

I know this film has come under some heavy criticism over the years, but I fail to see why. It is Cary Grant in one of his finest and funniest films. I suppose the bad reviews this film received was one of the reasons he retired shortly afterwards. It was classic Grant and one of his personal favourite performances, but it failed to find a large or appreciative audience, and I suppose out of all his films the failure of this one saddened him the most.

Cary Grant was 60 and Leslie Caron was 33 when this film came out in 1964. Grant was to make only one more film after this, even though he lived another 22 years. This movie gets its title from his code name, Mother Goose, and when he was forced to share his South Pacific island with a teacher (Caron) and her seven little girl students, he became more like a father goose.

ssssome SPOILERS, READ FURTHER AT YOUR OWN RISK. Grant played a beach bum who had run away from his job as a professor when he realized that everyone was expected to dress and talk alike. He was working for the allies in WW II, on a small island with rations, whiskey, and a radio, expected to report Japanese air traffic in that area. When a spotter on a neighboring island was shot and killed, he brought the teacher and her students back to his island.

Since this is a Cary Grant film, we expect romance to blossom and it surely does here. But not until near the very end, when they actually get married by radio, with a chaplain on the other end. When they first met, Grant was a sour, stingy man who just wanted to drink his whiskey and have the intruders go away. Eventually the kids softened him up, and he softened up the school marm.

This is just silly fluff of a movie, the only reason to watch it are Cary Grant and Leslie Caron. She was lovely in her early 30s, and in my opinion one of the most lovely actresses ever. She is still working, now in her 70s, and still lovely.

I know the plot sounds awful -- Cary Grant marooned on an island with Leslie Caron and half a dozen young girls -- but I found this pretty consistently funny. Of course you can predict just about everything that happens but it's so well written and the cast good enough that it should entertain most people.

Grant is a grizzled, irritable, hard-drinking loner in New Guinea at the start of World War II and is finessed by the local Navy Commander, Trevor Howard, into manning a coast watcher station on an isolated island. Howard and his crew have buried bottles of whiskey around the thatch-roofed hut and arranged for the location of one bottle to be revealed with each confirmed sighting of Japanese aircraft or ships.

Before long, circumstances force Grant to accommodate Caron and her diverse little charges -- two French, one Australian, and the rest British. There follow innumerable conflicts, small and large, as the unshaven, slovenly Grant is forced to sleep on his boat and does his best to avoid the kids, grumbling at their disruption of his unique life style and Weltanschaung.

Largely because of Grant's superb comic timing and his expressive features and body language, the encounters are far more often funny than silly. Nor are they over-written. Example: While the others are out somewhere, Grant sneaks back into the hut to search for the whiskey that Caron has hidden from him -- again. One child has been left behind and she stares at him silently as he rummages through the junk. Balked, frustrated, he glances sideways at her, there is a lengthy pause, then he speaks: "Beat it."

Example two: Believing Caron to have been fatally bitten by a venomous snake, Grant cuts the wound and sucks on it, then gets her drunk to make her death easier. Caron: "What did it taste like -- my blood." Grant: "How would I know? I'm not a vampire." Caron: "Was it salty?" Grant is nonplussed: "Well, a LITTLE salty." Caron: "OHH, was it TOO salty?" Grant (at his wit's end): "No -- it was JUST RIGHT." Caron sobs a little and says: "No, I know it was too salty." On the screen, with Cary Grant at his best and Caron doing a fine job, it's not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds. Grant delivers exactly the right measure of chagrin.

It's not an important film, not enough to go on about, but it's largely effective and should keep the kids laughing as well as the adults. The alcohol abuse we see is genteel. Grant swigs it straight out of the bottle but it's good Black & White scotch and he's never drunk. He is naturally reformed at the end. He even drinks a non-alcoholic beverage at dinner. "Coconut milk. Mmmm. Young coconuts must love it."

This is vintage Cary Grant, reminiscent of his earlier romantic comedies. He plays Walter Eckland, a rough, gruff, unkempt loaner coerced into being a spotter for the Royal Navy on a remote Pacific island. He is forced to take in a teacher and her seven charges, all female, ranging in age from 5 to 14. Leslie Caron is excellent and funny as the teacher. She sets out to change Walter "for the sake of the girls" by pouring out all his whiskey. One of the best scenes in the film comes when Leslie Caron is supposedly bitten by a snake (a stick) and Walter gets her drunk to ease the pain of her dying. This is great comedy. This film is a MUST SEE for Grant fans. Rating: 9.0

It was not quite what Cary Grant wanted, but it was certainly different. In his whole career he wanted to play a negative role - a person who was not debonair or likable but a villain. At time he was defeated by his own agent and the production studio from being a wife killer (SUSPICION)or a labor agitator suspected of arson murder (THE TALK OF THE TOWN) or he played a Cockney gad-about who confronts a mobster (NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART) or he played a gambler thinking of swindling a war-time tragedy (MR. LUCKY), or a suspected jewel thief (TO CATCH A THIEF) or a successful university professor who was targeted by a jealous rival (PEOPLE WILL TALK). But while some of these parts approached the villain he wanted to play, none hit the actual target.

In 1964 Grant finally got a chance to undercut his sophisticated, sharp dressing style. He got the chance to play South Sea island rat Walter Eckland, a grizzled loner who has little use for the modern world, and a large appetite for alcohol. The film was the film comedy FATHER GOOSE, co-starring Leslie Caron as Catherine Freneau (the daughter of a French colonial governor), and Trevor Howard as Commander Frank Houghton of the Royal Navy. Again, Grant was cheated out of the full chance of playing a disreputable type. Eckland is disreputable (he is first seen trying to steel gasoline supplies needed by the royal navy which is fleeing a threatened dockyard - for his own cabin cruiser). But by the time the film ends he is shown to be heroic.

Fortunately it is a comedy, with it's three leads playing well off each other. Grant is dragooned by Howard into being an island watcher for the British navy against Japanese planes and ships. To keep Grant from splitting, Howard wrecks the cabin cruiser, and he hides Grant's supply of alcohol. It works, but a few months later Grant is informed he has to perform a rescue from another island across the sea. He only does it when Howard informs him where the rest of the alcohol is hidden. Then he goes, only to find it is Caron and six little school girls left in her care when evacuating a French island. Almost immediately there is friction between Grant and Caron as to proper behavior in front of the girls, and in serving the young ladies and Caron first. When they get back to Grant's island, Caron has the young girls hide his liquor all over again.

It has been suggested that Grant and Caron were playing roles similar to Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in THE African QUEEN. Certainly in the relationship of Charlie and Rosie in that film there is a definite resemblance to that of Walter and Catherine. But this kind of "opposite attracts" appears before THE African QUEEN did. In VESSEL OF WRATH (set in the South Seas in the 1930s) the hard-drinking Charles Laughton ran afoul of missionary Elsa Lanchester. As with the other two pairings they eventually fall in love.

But the humor in FATHER GOOSE is Grant's attempts to maintain his control over the island, even while thrown out of his hut by Caron and her charges. Every time he tries to show who is boss, he's undercut by the ladies. Howard (although at a distance) is no real help - the war is of first importance to Allied planning, not rescuing angry drunken island rats. It is only when Grant shows that he can fish but Caron cannot that he starts reducing her ascendancy over him, and the cap-off is when he believes she is dying of snake poison, and she is made comfortable by large cups of Grant's booze in a coconut cup. With her hair down she suddenly is not so inhumane to Grant.

FATHER GOOSE is Cary Grant's last lead role. He hoped he would soon pass into supporting parts, but although the film did well at the box office (I saw it when it came out - the audiences were packed), it confused many who did not care for Grant being scruffy. The result was that Grant made one more comic film (WALK DON'T RUN) wherein he played the Charles Coburn part in this remake of THE MORE THE MERRIER. After that, Grant retired from motion pictures until his death in 1986. He never did get the chance to play that movie heavy he always wanted to - but he did leave a first rate record of sophisticated leading men comedies. That's not the worst reputation to leave behind one as a performer.