Father Goose

This was Cary Grant's penultimate film and a deliberate swerve away from his own persona. The immaculate man in the dinner jacket is gone. Walter Eckland is slovenly, hard-drinking and allergic to company, posted to a deserted Pacific island during the Second World War to watch for enemy planes. Then a prim French schoolteacher played by Leslie Caron takes refuge there with seven young pupils. The most striking thing about it is the history of the script. Peter Stone rewrote a screenplay by Frank Tarloff, which Tarloff had built from S. H. Barnett's story A Place of Dragons. The three writers met one another for the first time at the 1965 Academy Awards, collecting the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay together. Tarloff had been blacklisted, which is why his name spent years hidden behind other people's. Ralph Nelson directed. The comic timing holds, the sentiment stays measured, and Grant's drift from reluctance to tenderness is entirely convincing. Who it is for: viewers who love classic Hollywood comedy and Grant sending up his own image. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a war film, or bothered by a tone that treats wartime children as set dressing.