Escapade in Florence, on NBC
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This originally aired as a two-part story on "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" in 1962, and was also released theatrically as a single film in some countries. I feel like I might have seen it on TV sometime in the 1980s, but when I watched it on DVD in 2024, nothing about it was really familiar.
Tommy Kirk plays Tommy Carpenter, an American studying architecture in Florence, Italy. One day he's driving his Vespa, and nearly runs over an American art student named Annette Aliotto (Annette Funicello). At first he blames her for the accident, but when he sees her up close he apologizes. He pesters her quite a bit, when it seemed obvious she wasn't interested in him, so I immediately didn't like him. He finds a belonging of hers in the street, and follows her to an art dealer's shop, but gets caught up in another accident. By the time he can get to the shop, Annette is gone, and he pesters the art dealer into telling him where he can find her. She's staying above a restaurant run by a couple named Gisella and Mario, where she sings with a guy named Bruno, to entertain the customers. A bit of a rivalry for her affections develops between Tommy and Bruno, but really I would say the movie doesn't have a particularly romantic angle, and Annette doesn't end up with either one of them. (If she had, I would have been rooting for Bruno.)
Anyway, Tommy tries to buy a painting of Annette's from the art dealer, but an Englishwoman named Miss Brooks buys it before he can get the one he wants. So, he buys a different painting of Annette's. But after both paintings are wrapped, they get mixed up, and Tommy ends up with the one he wanted, after all. Unfortunately, the art dealer is working with a group of criminals who are trying to smuggle paintings out of the city. It turns out that the painting Tommy got conceals a much older painting by a famous artist, though Annette was under the impression that it was just a copy. Tommy, however, is convinced it's the real thing, especially after the criminals try to get it back.
Well, I don't want to divulge any more specific details of the plot, but Tommy, Annette, and Bruno wind up in some trouble before finally triumphing over the bad guys. I will say I liked how Bruno found it hard to believe Americans love their country more than their home cities, as Florence comes first in his heart before Italy. Because a country is too big to really love. I mean, I'm all for patriotism (as long as it doesn't get confused with nationalism), but he's got a point. I think a lot of Americans are indoctrinated to think they love their country first and foremost, even though they can't really know their whole country. But I'm spending too much time thinking about that relatively minor plot point, reading too much into it, I suppose. Other than that, the story was just okay. In fact, I feel like I'm being a bit generous by rating it one smiley. And it was hard to really get my head around the fact that we're meant to think Tommy is charming, when I thought most of the time he was kind of a creep. Still, I guess he got a bit better as the movie wore on.