Item 0001 - A New Melody Hit Set in Rome - Ten Thousand Bedrooms

• 1958-01-15 (Creation)

A New Melody Hit Set in Rome - A happy combination of comedy, romance and song, taking place against backgrounds of Rome, is achieved in M-G-M's latest CinemaScope and colour musical, “Ten Thousand Bedrooms”, the next attraction at the Majestic Theatre.

Directed by Richard Thorpe and produced by Joe Pasternak, who has given the screen such box-office winners as “The Opposite Sex” and “Meet Me in Las Vegas”, the new musical has a typically glittering Pasternak cast, Dean Martin, Anna Maria Alberghetti, glamorous European star Eva Bartok in her first Hollywood production, Dewey Martin, Walter Slezak, Paul Henreid and Jules Munshin.

Dean Martin plays Ray Hunter, a jaunty American millionaire hotel tycoon with an eye for feminine pulchritude, who arrives in Rome to acquire another hotel for the family chain and immediately becomes involved in romantic complications. First he is smitten by Maria Martelli (Eva Bartok), whom he meets in the course of the hotel transaction; then he falls in love with her flirtatious younger sister, Nina (Anna Maria Alberghetti).

Under the influence of champagne, a night plane ride over Rome, and one of the several romantic ballads which spot the action, Ray succumbs to the aggressive “get your man” tactics of Nina and proposes. But now Papa Martelli (Walter Slezak) puts a spoke in the proceedings.

There are two other glamorous daughters in the family and, since Nina is the youngest, she cannot be married until each of the other girls has found a husband.

How this dilemma is resolved leads to ten thousand bedroomsful of love-and-laugh complications in involving Dewey Martin as a Texan pilot who also has fallen for Nina, Paul Henreid as an impoverished nobleman whom Ray “pays” to take Maria off his hands after he switches to Nina, and Lisa Gaye and Lisa Montell, the two eyefuls enacting the remaining sisters.

In the closing scene, there is a quadruple wedding (this beats the double-wedding mark of “Guys and Dolls”) which leaves Papa Martelli completely bewildered. He can't figure out which of his daughters is married to which husband.

The songs include “You I Love”, “Only Trust Your Heart”, “Money Is a Problem”, “No One But You”, “Rock Around the Clock” and the title song.

Adding to the attraction are the background scenes of Rome, with the CinemaScope cameras offering frontrow seats to such famed tourist spots as the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain and the Villa Medici.

• Actor
• Actress
• Film
• United States of America

• Italy » Rome, Italy

• The Times of Ceylon Press (Creator)
• Loew's Incorporated (Creator)