Houseboat (Melville Shavelson, 1958)

A blast from an age where romantic comedies had to be served up with an earworm of a silly song, hammered home by the leads with multiple repetitions until each viewer was stuck with it ringing in their ears for weeks. Doris Day vehicles had to be the worst offenders, but plenty more starlets got delegated with the task, as here with Sophia Loren and the 'Bing Bang Bong' song.
For all that, Houseboat is a likeable enough piece of fluff, largely thanks to its dependable typecasting of Loren as a no-nonsense vivacious Italian and Cary Grant as an indignant and put-upon character with a soft centre. So, he's a widowed father of three button-nosed kids who ends up with La Loren as a maid, and of course a thirty-year age gap between the two leads will prove no obstacle at all to romance. If this sounds insufferably twee, at least the dialogue is perky and helps undercut the formula sweetness.

5/10