Recently, Michelle of Michelle, Books and Movies Addict nominated me for one of those blogging awards. I’ve blogged off and on since 2008 so I’ve done blogging awards, blogging associations, blogathons, etc. That’s why I really like writing here cause I don’t have to deal with any of that. I can just write. However, I told Michelle that I would review 10 Navy related movies. I thought that would be fun given that she was once in the Navy. So of course that means I start with this 1961 Greek comedy. How was I so lucky to come across this as the first movie?
It’s about a girl who falls in love with a sailor, follows him aboard ship, and needs to be hidden as a male sailor from her father who captains the ship. I know this doesn’t sound very realistic, but Michelle has assured me this once happened on a ship she was aboard (sarcasm). The difference was by the time she was in the Navy sailors had stopped breaking into random and pointless musical numbers. Speaking of musical numbers, this is one of those foreign musicals that doesn’t bother to subtitle the singing. They dub the dialogue, but I have no idea what they are singing. Can you imagine watching Singin’ In The Rain (1952) without knowing what they are singing about? Anyways, the movie opens up on a beach ball in the water.
Then we see a ship come along and pick it up. This ticks off a girl in another boat. This is Alice or Aliki (Aliki Vougiouklaki) depending on which version you are watching.
As you can see, she’s not happy about having her ball taken by the other ship. She jumps in the water and swims to the other ship. The guy there decides to play a pirate since she’s already called him one. But really, was it necessary to nearly bonk the guy on the head with the boom mic?
The boom mic has been dropping in a lot of the movies I’ve watched lately. However, to be fair, none of them have beaten The Explosive Generation (1961) in that department.
And that boom mic moves from the upper right to the center of the classroom, then droops down even further. But back to Alice In The Navy because it’s time for Alice to sing while riding a donkey.
I have no idea why, but then again I didn’t know why there needed to be music in the Bollywood remake of Switch (1991) called Mr. Ya Miss (2005), but there is. And more importantly, why have I seen it? It was bad.
Well, a large portion of this movie can be summed up like this.
Actress Aliki Vougiouklaki parades around in cute outfits.
Alice and sailor boy keep looking for each other and occasionally do find each other.
And the movie pads itself out with shots that don’t need to exist.
Wanna take a guess when the movie finally has Alice aboard the ship dressed as a sailor?
It happens 60 minutes into this 90 minute movie. Not since I watched Programmed To Kill has a movie taken that long to finally get to the point. And once it does, it doesn’t matter because the remainder is music, trying to hide her by pretending one of the male sailors can do a natural female voice (which his superior buys he can do), and the boys trying to get her a dress to leave the boat wearing.
This is all highly inaccurate. I can buy that male Greek sailors break out into song in Greek and speak dubbed English, but I can’t accept that any of them have done voice training to speak with female voices just for kicks.
Of course the father finally catches on and they get punished. By punished, I mean they get married.
This movie was bad. It just seems to drag on forever before getting to the it’s main plot point where it does a little music and a little unfunny comedy before just ending. It felt like just an excuse to say: Hey! We got hot blonde girls here in Greece too! Take that France and that Bardot woman of yours.
There’s no reason to sit through this. I’m sure there must be better movies with Aliki Vougiouklaki in them. Apparently, she was quite popular in Greece.