Main Cast: Clifton Webb, Dorothy McGuire, Jean Peters, Louis Jourdan, Maggie McNamara
Release Year: 1954
Country: US
Run Time: 120 minutes
Plot
Adapted by playwright John Patrick from a novel by famed globetrotter/filmmaker John H. Secondari, Three Coins in the Fountain offers the splendors of Rome in Technicolor, CinemaScope and Stereophonic Sounds. For all its lovely picture-postcard images, the film is at base a reworking of 20th Century-Fox' favorite plotline: three pretty girls on the prowl for husbands. The three lovelies, who toss their coins in the Trevi fountain and wish for romance, include Dorothy McGuire, Jean Peters and Maggie McNamara. Before the film is over, secretary McGuire has wooed her boss, Clifton Webb, Peters has won the heart of a co-worker Italian translator Rossano Brazzi (despite being fired, in the process, for having an office romance); and McNamara finds happiness with prince Louis Jourdan. Three Coins in the Fountain won two Academy Awards: "Best Color Cinematography" (Milton Krasner), and "Best Song" (written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, and sung in the pre-credits sequence by an uncredited Frank Sinatra). The film was remade in 1965 as The Pleasure Seekers, and also served as the basis for a never-sold TV pilot starring Yvonne Craig, Cynthia Pepper and Joanna Moore. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Three Coins in the Fountain is good melodrama thanks in large part to the film's Oscar-winning music and cinematography on the one hand and its shallow script on the other. Watching it confers on the viewer the same benefit as a noonday nap: pleasant oblivion. Frank Sinatra sings the title song, a winner that made Rome's Trevi Fountain -- into which visitors toss a coin to assure their eventual return to Rome -- one of the world's most famous landmarks. The story focuses on three American secretaries who fall in love in a Panglossian world in which nothing goes wrong, even when one of the beaus has six months to live. Audiences of the 1950s lapped it up, enabling them to escape their bomb shelters, McCarthy, and memories of World War II. The actors, who cheerfully recite their innocuous lines, include Maggie McNamara, Jean Peters, and Dorothy McGuire as men-hunting secretaries and Louis Jourdan, Rossano Brazzi, and Clifton Webb as their willing victims. The motion picture rises above itself with its beautiful images; the Eternal City never looked better. The dialogue contains nary a double-entendre, and none of the women reveals anything more than an ankle or a bare shoulder. But the film has its charm, and its Academy Award nomination as Best Picture proved that pleasant oblivion could vie with angst (as in 1954's On the Waterfront) for the hearts of the American filmgoing public. ~ Mike Cummings, All Movie Guide
