This featherweight crime comedy is mostly notable in retrospect for bringing together the talents of Walter Matthau and Tony Randall, stars of The Odd Couple--albeit Matthau in the 1968 film version of the Neil Simon Broadway play and Randall in the long-running ABC-TV sitcom spinoff. Directed by Morton DaCosta, Island of Love (1963) stars Robert Preston as a career swindler who, with partner-in-crime Randall, dupes New York gangster Matthau into financing a disastrous movie about Adam and Eve, starring Matthau's stripper girlfriend Betty Bruce. Fleeing the mobster's ire, the con men escape to Greece, where they dream up a brand new scam, conning locals and tourists alike into believing the lackluster island of Paradeisos is rich in priceless antiquities. Complications arise when Preston falls for village girl Giorgia Moll (seen next in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt), never suspecting that she is the vengeful Matthau's niece. The fourth-billed Matthau tended to look back on this period of his career (and this film in particular) with disdain but his fortunes were already on the upswing, with prominent roles in Clive Donner's Charade (1963) and Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964) just around the corner, as well as an Academy Award for Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966), which paired him for the first time onscreen with Odd Couple costar Jack Lemmon. Island of Love provided early film work as well for Michael Constantine, who played a Greek patriarch to great acclaim in the Oscar-nominated 2002 crowd-pleaser My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

By Richard Harland Smith