Gable looks old here, though they really lathered on his hair color to make Clark look younger. The story has him as a Philadelphia Lawyer. That would make him the bane of Groucho Marx jokes about them, but here Gable is not in court.He is in Naples and the lucky guy gets to meet a young beauty, Sophia Loren. Then he has an affair with her, and steals the heart of her son. What steals the show here is the great filming locations. Naples looks great in technicolor. The location shooting is a bonus and I am sure Gable enjoyed the trip, I mean to be portrayed as a lover young enough to handle Loren is a stretch, but most men in their late 50's would think they were living the dream if they could do this.For some reason, late in his career, Gable got many roles with the hottest women around. I mean after this he finishes with Marilyn Monroe. Before this, well there was Doris Day. I will tell you this, if I had been Gable, I would have died with a smile on my face. His reputation as a great lover is on display here, and his boyish type of charm is too. Not a great film, but definitely a good one.

This will be hard for many film lovers to believe, but I never liked Clark Gable. I've seen some of his classics like "Gone With the Wind" and "It Happened One Night", and I was always turned off by the narcissistic, arrogant jerk he always seemed to play. I only wanted to see this film because I was about to take a trip to Naples and I was hoping for some nice scenery. I was also hoping Gable wouldn't ruin it for me completely.Jackpot! The combination of the location filming, interesting premise, clever writing, humor, solid supporting performances by Marietto and Vittorio De Sica, and Gable's highly entertaining portrayal of a short-tempered curmudgeon rather than his usual dashing know-it-all really made this film for me. I don't know how many times I've watched it. I even bought the DVD, and I buy very few due to a serious lack of storage space, because I knew I would want to share it.During the time I spent in Naples I was constantly reminded of things in the movie: fireworks, schedules that are wrong but 'everyone knows it', endless varieties of coffee… this movie really "gets" Naples, and surprisingly some things about it haven't changed all that much in fifty years.And now that I'm finally feeling well-disposed towards Mr. Gable, maybe I'll have to give some of his other work a second try.

"It Started in Naples" reminds me very much of the major hit Clark Gable had a quarter century before, "It Happened One Night." Both were movies with screwball moments. If "It Started in Naples" was meant at all to be a remake, it is more of a real reworking, and a most effective one at that.As good as Claudette Colbert was as an actress, Sophia Loren sizzles in this film. She is both sexy and funny. Clark Gable may have seemed quite old by then; his heavy smoking aged him, and no doubt caused his fatal heart attack later in 1960. But he handles the role with such ease! And after all, a younger woman going with an older man is not so unusual.The entire cast does a great job. One thing to watch for: When Gable goes into the town square looking for Lucia, you'll see everybody and anybody there, including a long-haired, bearded man. You'd have never seen that in 1934! Seeing that shows that "It Started in Naples" was from the Sixties! This is one fun film! And it makes you wonder what might have been had Clark Gable lived through the 1960s

This was the first Clark Gable movie I ever remember seeing and I saw it in the old Marine Theatre in Brooklyn. Turned out also to be the last one Clark Gable got to see released as The Misfits was released after Gable's demise.He's an honest to God Philadelphia lawyer who had a brother who deserted his wife and took off for Italy where he lived with another woman. The brother has died and Gable has gone to Italy to settle the estate.The estate's one very tangible asset was the brother's son played very winningly by Marietto. Mom is deceased also and the boy is living with her sister and who wouldn't want an aunt who looked like Sophia Loren. It's a custody battle and the question the movie asks is how will the issue be settled, in or out of court?Gable's certainly a mature leading man playing about 15 to 20 years younger than he is, but he carries it off well. And Sophia Loren is wonderful to see.But the real star of this film is the Isle of Capri, one of the most beautiful spots on this old planet. Capri was getting a lot of publicity from Hollywood. Only a year before Mario Lanza's last film, For the First Time, also was shot a great deal in Capri. After these two films the tourist business must have boomed.Sophia Loren has a few nice numbers to sing and one of them was the song Americano. It had a revival a few years ago in Matt Damon's The Talented Mr. Ripley. But Sophia's version is soooooooooo much better.