Sometimes, even playing the ESL card isn't enough.

Sometimes you just have to watch Pier Angeli move for a while. She was undeniably adorable in her youth, but she's hard to take when forced outside of her typical acting range. Here's a 19-year-old Pier doing her best to pull off being an 18-year-old German orphan who's working in a cabaret with something of a small enterprise in the black market on the side -- and she's mixed up in a plot to bring the Nazis back to power shortly after WWII's end [it's that kind of a movie]:



This is not a good film. "Turgid" would be a good word for it -- hard to believe that a dramatic-role Gene Kelly fighting Nazis and wooing a young Pier could be so disappointing. Why a producer would shoehorn a very young Italian actress [who was still struggling to learn the English] into a role as a remarkably complex and choppily written German is beyond me. Kelly isn't quite as creepy looking in the movie as he comes off in this excerpt, by the way.