The World of Henry Orient (1964) Movie Review
Two thirteen-year-old girls, Valerie and Gil, pursue eccentric concert pianist Orient (Peter Sellers) about New York, while he’s busy attempting to woo first the paranoidly chilly Stella (Paula Prentiss), and then Val’s own not exactly kind and loving mother (Angela Lansbury) (Angela Lansbury).
This promises initially to be Disney-Hayley Mills charming, but goes instead for poetic anarchy, screwball humour, caustic sarcasm, and a heartbreaking undertone of family sadness. It’s the somewhat comical edge to the girls’ acts, and the justifications for them, that avoids everything being too cartoonish, and the dark underbelly comes rushing out with perfect time.
As bright and zesty as the film’s youthful heroines seem today, they’re lying on top of a Petulia or Igby Goes Down junior emotional minefield surrounded by the super-rich and super-creepy. But the humorous set-pieces are actually entertaining, like the avant-garde performance Orient presents during which orchestra members play checkers, and the picture is delightfully pleasant.
directed by George Roy Hill, always good at keeping serious material and comedy in dialetic balance, and fired up by a bunch of terrific performances, first and foremost, of course, being Sellers’ title character, a right wanker whose accent swings between the damndest affected Euro brogue and his native Brooklynese; Prentiss doing one of her patented weirdos; Lansbury doing one of her patented maternal bitches; Tom Bosley showing how he got cast as Mr. C by playing a concerned papa; and two great mischievous jobs as the girls, played by Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker.
