A Most Unusual Midwife

Miss Agnes is back…

Some movies don’t deserve to be forgotten, and 1962’s Jessica is one of those. While it’s not a great film, it’s a charmer and well-worth a watch. While our guest of honor has a pretty memorable, albeit minimal part, in it as an Italian grandmother, this is definitely Jessica’s movie.

The film opens with Maurice Chavalier as Father Antonio, who sets the scene in the Sicilian village of Forza d’Agro. A new American midwife, Jessica Brown Visconti (Angie Dickinson) has just arrived in town, and it’s an understatement that she’s very alluring and all the men in town are after her, married or otherwise. It’s not that Jessica is especially coquettish; she’s just a kind person who likes taking care of everyone.

All the women in town are naturally suspicious. They’re hoping Jessica is a bad midwife who hates her job, but the opposite turns out to be true. The men, while they might gawk at Jessica as she speeds through town on her Vespa, are still just as attentive to their wives, if not more so, but the women are still suspicious because they think their husbands are all thinking of Jessica.

Forza’s women hatch a plan: They’ll stop procreating. No babies, no midwife, and by extension, no more Jessica. The town matriarch, Maria Lombardo (Agnes Moorehead) is kind of iffy about the plan but she’s on board with it. The men might be miserable for a while, but if the village can get rid of Jessica, their troubles will be over. Father Antonio overhears and cautions the women about the morality of the whole idea, but he also sort of gets why they want to do what they want to do.

It’s no shock that things don’t go according to plan. The various husbands don’t take too kindly to being frozen out by their wives, and Jessica is extremely hurt when she finds out what the village women have decided. At the same time, though, she meets handsome recluse Marchese Eduardo Raumo (Gabriele Ferzetti) at a wedding, who for some reason tells her he’s a fisherman and he’s going off on his fishing boat for the next seven weeks. Jessica doesn’t buy it because she doesn’t think Eduardo seems like a fisherman, and when the truth comes out she’s not too happy with him. These things have a way of working out, of course, and in the meantime Father Antonio observes all of it and makes musical commentary as necessary.

If any of this seems slightly Gigi-like, that’s because it is, at least as far as Maurice Chevalier presiding over the story is concerned. He doesn’t even change his accent and is just as charming as he always is.

To be fair, though, most of the cast don’t really change their accents, either. Our Miss Agnes’s Maria Lombardo sounds as American as Jessica does, plus the rest of the ensemble is peppered with Armenians, Croats, other French besides Chevalier, Americans, not to mention a few bonafide Sicilians, and every one of the women have a languid beauty on the line of Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobridgida.

Given all of this, Jessica seems as if it should be a lot steamier than it is, but it’s just a cute, lightweight comedy without much to it even if it is enjoyable. Funnily enough, though, United Artists promoted the film as if it was a Sicilian Peyton Place, with Jessica shown either astride her Vespa or standing next to it with her derriere sticking out, oftentimes in extremely short hotpants. Jessica‘s title character was also generally described as “a honey-haired dish of dynamite who explodes on the screen.”

Never mind that Jessica never wore hotpants in the film, preferring normal skirts or dresses and maybe some demure capris, and she really wasn’t the type to stick out her posterior. The media also had to tread lightly around the movie’s premise of Catholic women refusing to have children, which was problematic in that time. Pressbooks in some locales such as Buffalo, New York were careful not to show Maurice Chevalier dressed as a priest because they didn’t want people to think the film had a religious angle.

Instead, publicity tended to center around pretty girls on scooters and piled on the adjectives when describing the film, giving out a phone number for people to call as if Jessica was a real girl looking for a good time. In Toronto a radio contest was even held, with the grand prize winner taking home a Vespa worth four hundred dollars. The famous scooter company happily cashed in on publicity from Jessica, showing up to the premier of the film in London with United Artists executives.

In spite of all the energetic teasing, Jessica ranked low at the 1962 American box office, bringing in one and a half million dollars, and buzz about the film seemed to die down quickly. It’s not hard to guess why, seeing as the top movies of that year were Laurence of Arabia, To Kill A Mockingbird and The Music Man.

Why has Jessica been forgotten, even though it’s not a bad movie? Who knows. It’s hard to say why certain movies get the star treatment and others are left to gather dust, but it’s probably due to overall response and ongoing demand after the movie has left theaters. Maybe people felt gypped when they found out the publicity for Jessica didn’t match what was on the screen. At least we can see it on Amazon Prime, so it’s fared better than some movies we can all mention.

For more of the great Agnes Moorehead, please see Crystal at In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. Thanks for bringing this back, Crystal–it’s nice to visit with Miss Agnes again. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you tomorrow for another post…

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Jessica is free to stream for Prime customers.

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