SYNOPSIS: Self-styled "genius" is reduced to working for room and board as a live-in babysitter.COMMENT: An extraordinarily popular film in its day, Sitting Pretty had the good fortune to incorporate a tailor-made role for the waspishly caustic Clifton Webb - who was even nominated for a prestigious Hollywood award for Best Actor. He had previously been twice nominated for Best Supporting Actor (for Laura and The Razor's Edge) but once again he was to miss out - this time due to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet! Nevertheless, Sitting Pretty left Shakespeare for dead in the boxoffice stakes and sired two sequels: Mr Belvedere Goes to College and Mr Belvedere Rings the Bell. The comedy holds up rather well, although I said at the time and I say again; Richard Haydn makes a major contribution to the merriment. Webb actually comes on rather late in the piece. It is Haydn and Ed Begley who hold the audience's interest to that point. Young and O'Hara are pretty dull - though they make effective stooges - and their kids are the usual Hollywood brats. It is one of the film's joys that Webb uses them for target practice! Lang's direction is routinely competent but lacks any finesse of style or sophistication. (It always beats me why 20th Century-Fox was known as "the director's studio" - they had such an undistinguished lot of capable but boring hacks under contract: people like Walter Lang, Henry Koster, Henry King, John M. Stahl, Lloyd Bacon, George Seaton, Jean Negulesco. Perhaps King doesn't belong on this list for there are a few others, notably Gregory Ratoff and Edmund Goulding, whose work is equally variable, but how do they compare with Cukor, Wyler, Wellman, Curtiz, Farrow, Wood, Auer, Capra, Minnelli, Wilder, Huston, Walsh or Hitchcock?)OTHER VIEWS: A slick domestic comedy with a truly "original" character in Lyn Belvedere (there is only one "n" in his Christian name, though in the sequels two are adopted). Webb plays him to the "T", aided by a solid support cast headed by Richard Haydn as the snoopiest neighbor ever to hit suburbia. Of course the idea of turning village mores into a scandalous best-seller has been used many times (see The Affairs of Martha) - it wouldn't work anyway as most people couldn't care less about the town in which they're forced to live - but even this cliché does little to lessen the impact of Belvedere himself.

This is really a very funny movie indeed.It is conventional in that the setting is an aptly-named picture-box small, white-painted, though gossipy, town, full of middle ranking executives and professionals bringing up their families and providing competently for their spouses (well, wives, really). Unconventional in that absolutely the most extraordinary character suddenly implants himself into the situation with immediate and transforming effect. Something like this happens in reverse when Sheridan Whiteside lands the wrong way up on the doorstep of Mr and Mrs Ernest Stanley in "The Man who came to Dinner". The direction wisely delays the principal character's entry for some time and it takes at least some nerve to do this but it works brilliantly here.Clifton Webb manages to be both seriously comic and comically serious at the same time and there is genius in that ability. It is entirely credible that the quite sparky children rapidly take to Lynn Belvedere, no matter how often they are reproved by him.Other reviewers have set out the story well enough that it need not be rehashed here, but what stands out in Clifton Webb's brilliantly iconoclastic performance (I mean that the class of personages known usually as babysitters does, apparently, contain a subset marked "other") is the way in which he simply makes himself fit in, not only to Robert Young's noisy family, but into this movie itself in an artistic sense. Webb's character is more than outrageous, but not for a moment do the other characters in the film, nor we, actually draw the line and (r)eject him. It's a great achievement, indeed.He does have the able assistance of the British actor Richard Haydn, as the snoopy adenoidal neighbour, who is also tremendously entertaining on screen, both vocally and with several excellent visual gags at the ready. Haydn and Webb do use the movie to prove that the screen is too small for the both of 'em and the rest of the cast thus bounce off them gleefully whenever either or both are playing a scene.The Mr Belvedere character was subtly used in two sequels to "Sitting Pretty" which both explore its creative and dramatic valency in quite satisfyingly different ways.Nothing wrong with "Sitting Pretty" at all, and everything right: one is left on something of a high for several days.

This is a wonderful movie. It get's the point across beautifully. It is witty, it has style, it has charm. And it has a flaw! A major flaw as do most of the movies made. Believability is marred by one big giant mistake.In my copy of this movie---which I purchased---when Tacey comes home because Tony has an upset stomach and the snoopy neighbor Mr. Appleton comes over--when he leaves, the closing of the front door tells us this is a sound-stage and believability is gone! Just about every movie made, the door gives believability a heave-ho, a great big kick out the door.Front doors of houses and even some apartments make a whoosh sound when opened or closed. They don't bang. And there is another sound of the latch clicking.Furthermore a front door is heavy. The sound production staff---if they want to garner your attention on the story and keep it alive, have got to do something about this. Because my attention to the storyline is lost.If this seems like nitpicking to readers, wait until they watch a movie and hear the front door bang and they will know exactly what I am talking about.

As the self-proclaimed genius, Mr. Belvedere, CLIFTON WEBB delivers every line of dialog with such crisp authority that you believe he IS the eccentric character who volunteers his services as a live-in babysitter for ROBERT YOUNG and MAUREEN O'HARA and their unruly brood.Webb simply steals every scene with skillful ease, except when RICHARD HAYDN enters the film as a snobbish, adenoidal neighbor who is another kind of genius at snooping. Before you know it, Belvedere has all of these citizens under his thumb, exposing the hypocrisy of small-town gossip in his novel, much the way Grace Metalious did when she pried open the lid of PEYTON PLACE.It's all for laughs and never fails to delight. This is the film that really established Webb's long career at Fox in roles that seemed tailor-made for his kind of pompous charm.