Rfischer8655 A pack of school girls in uniform and caps running around in constant tropical heat? Food and water never a priority and nobody showing a trace of sweat? This movie is so silly and unbelievable the comedy seems to be straining and never hits home.Cary Gant and Trevor Howard put in good performances. But I don't know how these fine actors could have resisted smirking and scoffing at this silly script. With all the alcohol consumption tagged as funny and frivolous by the storyline, no wonder Trevor Howard became a serious alcoholic and later succumbed as a result.The World War 2 setting as backdrop for a situation comedy rivals Hogan's Heroes. If this had been a story about survival on a tropical island during the war, even with some comedy, it might have worked. But the party-like atmosphere and antics under what would really be fear and hardship makes it simply silly, vapid, and uninteresting. A waste of acting talent and energy.

kenjha During WWII, an American is stationed on a South Seas island with the task of spotting Japanese planes, but ends up looking after a woman and seven schoolgirls. This is a colorful and entertaining comedy, but the material is stretched a bit thin at nearly two hours. Surprisingly, the screenplay won an Oscar. Grant seems to be having fun in his penultimate film, although he was perhaps too old to be getting romantic with Caron, nearly 30 years his junior. Even Grant knew he was too old, as this was the last time he played a romantic lead. Caron mostly just tries to be French, although the scene where she gets drunk is amusing.

Robert J. Maxwell 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."

Spikeopath Father Goose is Cary Grant's second to last film, with hindsight I personally would have liked this to have been his final film. Not that his last picture, Walk Don't Run, is a stinker, I just feel this particular film leaves a more fitting impression to the great man's comedic ability.Playing against his sophisticated image, Father Goose sees Grant playing a drunken beach bum who is stuck on a South Sea island with Leslie Caron and her seven young lady scholars. Bluffed into being there in the first place by crafty Trevor Howard {Commodore Frank Houghton}, Grant as Walter Eckland is more concerned with the fact that the Commodore has hidden all of his whiskey rather than focus on actual work! As the Japanese forces close in on the group, Eckland is forced to find his fatherly and straightened out inner self, thus providing comedy, drama, and of course a little romance into the bargain.I could have done with a far more stronger female lead than Caron, who does OK without really convincing as a viable comedy lead, whilst Trevor Howard merely looks to be reading from an autocue. But with an Oscar winning screenplay from Frank Tarloff and Peter Stone, and Cary delivering some cracking one line zingers, Father Goose gets in and does it's job with some delightfully cheery results. 7/10