Father Goose

Father Goose (1964)

They're sharing a South Sea island with 7 little chaperones...and the Pacific as their battleground!

During World War II, South Sea beachcomber Walter Eckland is persuaded to spy on planes passing over his island. He gets more than he bargained for as schoolteacher Catherine Frenau arrives on the run from the Japanese with her pupils in tow!

Date of release
1964-12-10
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (207)
Runtime
1h 58m
Genres
Adventure, Comedy, Romance
Director
Ralph Nelson

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 3. Including: Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay

Father Goose is a 1964 American Technicolor romantic comedy film set in World War II, starring Cary Grant, Leslie Caron and Trevor Howard. The title is a play on the children's fiction character of "Mother Goose," which is used as a code name assigned to the coastwatcher character played by Grant. Based on a story A Place of Dragons by Sanford Barnett, the film won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It introduced the song "Pass Me By" by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, later recorded by Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and others.

Production

The film was based on a short story by S Barnett called A Place of Dragons. Producer Hal Chester hired Frank Tarloff, with whom he had worked on School for Scoundrels, to write the screenplay. Tarloff turned the project down at first calling it "a poor man's African Queen", but changed his mind. Originally the film was going to be a "small British picture" directed by Cy Endfield, who like Tarloff was an American blacklistee living in England.

According to the New York Times, Cary Grant was given the original story by an executive at Universal who liked it. He passed it along to Peter Stone, who told him he wanted to write the screenplay. Grant then arranged for Stone to be signed to Father Goose; Stone's contract called for a picture a year for five years.

At one stage, David Miller was going to direct but that job eventually went to Ralph Nelson.

There were a number of films and TV shows in the early 1960s that featured coastwatcher characters, in part due to the fact President John F. Kennedy's life had been saved by a coastwatcher during World War Two.

Father Goose was filmed on location in Jamaica. Filming began in May 1964.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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