A Technicolor Key to Trump’s Desires

Bill Lattanzi illuminates Trump’s dark fantasies through the lens of a Hollywood classic, Melville Shavelson’s “Houseboat.”

By Bill LattanziOctober 26, 2024

• Film

• Politics

• History

• Cultural Studies

DONALD TRUMP’S THREE wives have all skewed fairer-skinned and blonde. But Trump’s fantasies and desires are of a different order, spewing out in spontaneous and increasingly uncontained campaign rally remarks. Looking at the portrait of Kamala Harris on the cover of Time magazine, Trump saw “the most beautiful actress ever to live.” “Is that Sophia Loren?” he mused. “Oh, they must be celebrating the great life and times of the magnificently beautiful Sophia Loren.” It was meant as a derisive crack against journalistic bias, but something more lingers in the air.

Loren, the iconic Italian film star, is now 90, but in the time of Trump’s youth, she was alluringly exotic. She was one of several foreign “bombshells” marketed to ignite the lust of American men. In the racial coding of the 1950s, these women were something other than white Americans. Only slightly othered, they offered a hint of taboo without the danger of crossing racial lines. Today, Trump wants the biracial Harris to keep to the South Asian side of her identity, so that she might remain an acceptable object of his unconscious desire. “She was always of Indian heritage,” Trump told the National Association of Black Journalists, adding, “then all of a sudden […] she became a Black person.” Loren brings that preference closer to home. “[S]pot the difference,” posted a Dolce & Gabbana co-founder in 2017, showing pictures of Sophia Loren and Melania Trump, born in Slovenia as Melanija Knavs, side by side. There are many obvious differences, we might say. But then, we are not Trump, for whom reality is—increasingly—a distracting irritant.

Loren came to the United States to make movies only a few times. In 1958, she co-starred with Cary Grant in the romantic comedy Houseboat, directed by Melville Shavelson. The on-screen epitome of good looks and gentlemanly sophistication in the post-war era, Grant was a fictional ideal. The actor, whose given name was Archibald Leach, famously quipped, “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

So does Donald. When a reporter in 2005 asked him who could play him in the movie of his life, Trump responded, “[I]deally, Cary Grant reincarnated.” This year, during one of his campaign rally rambles, Trump gushed, “Do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? […] [T]he most handsome man.”

Houseboat is a prime example of what Trump so admires when he looks at Cary Grant. While it may seem at first blush a pleasant—if dated—bit of studio fluff, looked at in light of our present political scene, the film becomes something much darker. Sixty-five years after its release, it offers up a precise, lurid portrait of the white American patriarchy to which Trump promises to return us. Awash in both blatant and unconscious racism and misogyny, it is a Technicolor key to Trump’s inner life, and a fever dream of his vision for the country's future.

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The White House

The film’s plot is simple, and a little strange. Cary Grant plays Tom Winters, a staid mid-level lawyer for the State Department. Tom has been separated for several years from wife and family and lives the bachelor’s life in Washington, DC, and London. His extremely wealthy wife, Alice, whose name is mentioned only once in the entire film, is newly dead, killed in a horrific car crash. Alice’s father William (John Litel), a big, blunt man with an eye on the dollar, seems more upset that Alice failed to insure the car than he is at his daughter’s demise. Death is one thing, money irretrievably and needlessly lost quite another. Granddad assigns the care of Tom’s three children to separate relatives. But Tom Winters did not inherit the transactional view of life. He objects to having his “kids parceled out like cabbages.” “They don’t parcel out cabbages,” harrumphs old William. “They are sold in carload lots.” On impulse, Tom rejects the offer and instead takes on the job of single dad, a position for which he is hopelessly ill-suited.

It’s easy to predict the film’s flow from here: with the love of a good woman, Tom Winters will thaw, learn responsibility and the joys of fatherhood, and, as sure as fireworks on the Fourth of July, marry again. Lingering at the edge of the scene is the prime candidate for wife number two, Tom’s dead wife’s sister, Carolyn (Martha Hyer). She first appears in a hospital white dress, her seriously blonde hair pulled back as tightly as Kim Novak’s in Vertigo, which was released the same year as Houseboat. It will emerge that she is, Vertigo-like, a dead (that is to say live) ringer for her sister. Slotting in Carolyn for the deceased wife and mother will appear to all as the clear way to keep the gears of this very white American family running smoothly, something like the way Trump traded Ivana for Marla and Marla for Melania, without changing an ounce of his personality.

Tom expresses no grief for the loss of the woman he once loved, and neither do any of the adults. The mother’s death, however, falls hard upon the children. They are David (Paul Petersen), a sulky 13; Elizabeth (Mimi Gibson), easily frightened (in the taxonomy of the time, all girls are easily frightened), about nine; and Robert (Charles Herbert), seven. Robert is the most soulful of the three. “My mother’s dead!” he shouts to deaf ears. “I hate everybody in the whole wide world!” It is Robert who will get the story moving, escaping his stranger-father and the open-air classical concert Tom thinks his kids will love, to meet-cute with another runaway: the high-spirited, hands-waving, overemotional, stereotypical Italian Cinzia Zaccardi, played by the young Sophia Loren. Cinzia is daughter to Arturo Zaccardi (Eduardo Ciannelli), a celebrated conductor and composer on American tour.

Cinzia is both an innocent in a dangerous world and (of course!) a budding agent of sexual chaos. She runs away because, as she tells her father, “I’m already 22 and I haven’t yet given my first performance for a man, any man.” She ditches her father’s concert by commandeering a rowboat. She discovers little Robert hiding in the boat only after launch. Together, they arrive at the film’s first liminal space: an unlikely riverside combination carnival, amusement park, and dance hall. Sex is in the air. Disreputable men approach Cinzia one by one, ready to grab her by the —. Cinzia signals her interest; then the men notice the child and withdraw. There are rigged carny games and pizza and dancing. Cinzia keeps trying to ditch Robert, because he’s messing up her chance to “perform”—but in the end, he becomes her best dance partner. Together they clear the floor, as she twirls the tyke on her hips, holding the delighted but bewildered child tight to her breast in a kind of light-hearted “let’s sex the kid up” joke that original audiences might have roared at, but which now pulls at the decade’s thread of unacknowledged abuse. (There are smutty kids-and-sex jokes sprinkled throughout the film, from Elizabeth suggesting that she and her father and Cinzia all sleep together to 13-year-old David making a near-pass at Cinzia. “I was twelve years old, and I knew what I was lookin’ at,” Petersen, who played David, would later recall.)

Tom is briefly worried to have lost his son, but not overly so. When Cinzia turns up with the boy, her dress and face smudged with dirt from all the running away and rowboat stealing, Tom immediately assumes she is a prostitute. He hands over a wad of cash for her services, and when he adds a verbal insult, Cinzia slaps him. He slaps her back, hard. Know your place. “In the good old days,” Trump reminds us, protesters were treated “very, very rough.” Crime, he has claimed recently, could be stopped with “one really violent day.”

In short order, the children insist on hiring the warm and joyful Cinzia as their nanny. Tom accedes, amid much nudge-nudge innuendo from his army buddy. He is oblivious to Cinzia’s charms, scarcely believable given that she is Sophia Loren. Cary Grant’s dictum, though, was that he must never be the pursuer, always the pursued. In real life, the five-times-married Grant “looked at pretty women with the mood of an avid hunter,” David Thomson wrote. Grab ’em by the —.

During filming, Grant pursued Loren against her wishes. After meeting on a previous film, the pair were rumored to have had an affair, and Loren to have turned down Grant’s proposal of marriage. In fact, Grant had his then-wife written out of the Houseboat script (the film had been her idea) in favor of Loren. “I just met the new Garbo,” he declared to the filmmakers. The writing team of Jack Rose and director Shavelson, who began their careers as joke writers for Bob Hope, had no objection. In his memoir, Shavelson says he knew of Loren before Houseboat, because he had a framed photo of her, topless, that he kept in a desk drawer. “I would often review it,” he writes, “for inspiration.”

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The Houseboat

Carolyn is replacing a guesthouse on her vast property with a swimming pool, so Tom buys the house, arranging to have it moved to a convenient plot of land he apparently owns nearby. The white-painted home is uprooted and towed by tractor through the countryside but gets stuck on a set of railroad tracks in transport and smashed to bits. In recompense, the crass Italian American tractor driver, Angelo (Harry Guardino), offers up his houseboat as temporary shelter. It is, of course, a dump.

The houseboat is the film’s central liminal space. Here, downstream from the Capitol, removed from society, the rules don’t seem to apply. Tom sets out immediately to reestablish them, a dictator on Day One. His first order is to cover over the naturally weathered gray of the walls—no color, no hierarchy—with a blinding coat of arctic white paint. Cinzia and Tom slowly, inevitably fall in love. Only Cinzia knows it, though. Tom remains ignorant of his feelings for her, likely because he views her as a second-class citizen, low-class and off-white. (Not a single person of color appears in the entire film. The Italians, however much they were rising in the United States at the time, are the film’s approximation of racial difference.) This on-the-river budding romance might point to a loosening of the film’s race and class strictures if it didn’t also carry with it the unsettling echo of Huck and Jim on the raft. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim only becomes a full human being because a white child sees him that way. In Houseboat, Cinzia changes in Tom’s eyes from rebellious slattern to something like a personal servant. She’s content with that; in this film’s dark imagination, a woman of her sort is happiest when restricted.

In her own life, Loren was an empowered professional, on equal footing, if not more powerful than any and all co-workers. But she believed in traditional gender roles to a shocking degree. “A wife,” she wrote in her memoir, “should be 100 [percent a] slave to her husband.” Houseboat toes this line. But Cinzia is titillating in her subservience. “I’m certain you wouldn't do anything to embarrass me, or would you?” Tom asks his new friend. Of course she will. The embarrassment, though, is a feature, not a bug—for it demonstrates to the world Tom’s dominance.

The film climaxes with a country club dance. Tom asks Cinzia to go—not with him, but with Angelo—to the low-class Sons of Italy Ball. “I took the liberty of accepting the invitation for you,” Tom informs Cinzia. She is further consigned to her place with a gift from a jealous Carolyn—a garish gold lamé gown, festooned with oversize flowers. Off-screen, Cinzia removes all trace of the tacky roses without damaging the dress, then fits it to her body like a second skin. The result should be put in the Museum of the Male Gaze. She emerges looking somewhere between a female Oscar statuette and Shirley Eaton, the Bond Girl killed in Goldfinger (1964), discovered nude in bed, painted gold from head to toe. But Cinzia is very much alive, perhaps as alive as anyone has ever been. (The notorious ladies’ man and movie star William Holden once remarked that Loren, five feet, nine inches tall before heels, did not enter a room—she swept into it: “I never saw so much woman coming at me in my entire life.”) The men are dumbstruck when they see her. They have the same stunned look that Trump had when Harris strode across the debate stage to invade his space and shake his hand.

Cinzia ends up at the country club with Tom. While she charms the assembled guests, Tom abruptly proposes to Carolyn, the double of his dead blonde wife. There is no love between them, but Tom is going the only way he has known, the white way. But he then falls into a romantic trance with Cinzia on the dance floor. It’s the film’s turning point, when Tom finally realizes that he is in love with her, her status be damned. When Cinzia hears the news about Tom’s sudden engagement, another sharp slap to his face sets off the sprint to the finish. One land-and-sea chase later, the couple make love in the stolen rowboat, their moonlit thrusts sophomorically ringing a bell in adolescent David’s room. An idea from the Bob Hope joke book.

The children are shocked at the idea of Cinzia becoming their new mother. “You don’t look anything like her,” David says. Sure, it’s fun to flirt with the off-white maid/nanny/possible whore. But to make her the Madonna/mother, too?

Cinzia leaves, certain she will ruin the family. Tom pursues, appearing at her father’s door. “Zaccardi knows what she wants,” the patriarch declares, handing his daughter off to Tom. Cinzia, absurdly, meekly assents, passing through her father’s hotel doorway to stand beside Tom like a child without rights. Grant’s fourth wife, the actress Dyan Cannon, relates a similar incident in her memoir, Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant (2011). In the recounted scene, Cannon has been resistant to taking LSD with Grant. Mirroring the film, Cannon’s father becomes involved. But here, he objects, until Grant brings the hammer down. Her father says, “She’s my daughter. And I know her better than anyone.” “Well, she’s my wife, Ben. She lives under my roof. That means she’s under my jurisdiction now,” Grant replies.

And there it is. It’s a line practically pulled from the Republican platform. Or, in the words of this year’s Minnesota Republican senatorial candidate, order must be established because “women have become too mouthy.”

The film ends with the wedding of Tom and Cinzia. The ceremony is not in a church or on a grand estate, but on the houseboat, anchored in the Potomac, where George Washington roamed, that liminal place where a new nation could be born, and maybe a newer nation could begin again. Even Carolyn takes part in the ceremony, though she looks none too happy about it. The credits roll as soon as the ceremony begins, as if lingering too long on the scene might raise objection.

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The Car

Twenty minutes into the film, Tom drives the kids and Cinzia through a winding country road in a convertible the size of a studio apartment. His hands wrap softly around the molded plastic, finger-grooved, aqua steering wheel, an embodiment of the American suburban dream. The same year Houseboat was released, 1958, a model of that car, the Plymouth Belvedere, was buried in a concrete case in a time capsule in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The car’s tomb was guaranteed to withstand a nuclear attack. When the town fathers disinterred it in 2007, they discovered that the encasement had leaked. The Belvedere’s gleaming body was rotted out, its undercarriage rusted through.

Miss Belvedere, as the car was dubbed, was shipped to a restorer in New Jersey who hoped to return her to her former glory. Everything, the big (the biggest!) car would proclaim, was better in the past. Except, of course, it wasn’t. In 2017, the car, still a wreck, was transported to an auto museum in Roscoe, Illinois, where it sits, a reminder that the sell-by date of the good old days has long since passed.