This slight romantic comedy from the 1950s is good for a few hours of escapism, so long as you're not expecting surprises. 

Tom Winston (Cary Grant) returns home from aboard after the death of his estranged wife.  They had been separated for four years and were about to be divorced, and Tom barely knows his three children, David (Paul Peterson), Robert (Charles Herbert), and Elizabeth (Mimi Gibson).  He discovers that his in-laws are just assuming that they will keep the children; father-in-law even has a custody agreement all ready for him to sign.  But Tom scoops up the three kids and takes them with him. 

Tom works for the State Department and has a tiny apartment in sweltering D.C., and if he ever knew anything about parenthood, he's forgotten it.  So he decides to hire a maid and move the children out to the country.

Enter Cinzia Zaccardi (Sophia Loren).  The pampered but stifled daughter of a world-famous Italian conductor, Cinzia is in D.C. with her father on tour.  Fed up with her father's domineering ways and the snooty 'only the best people' crowd that he deals with, Cinzia takes off.  And applies for the job as Tom's maid.   He hires her, mainly because the children adore her.   She tells him she came to the US and then got jilted by the American soldier who was going to marry her.  (There's actually quite a lot of 'classist' subtext here that the producers were probably unaware of at the time.  Elegant Cinzia is mistaken for a lower class woman, which seems to make her ineligible.)

The charming cottage that they were supposed to be moving to gets wiped out (by a train! - it was being moved to a new site), so the whole clan winds up in a dilapidated houseboat on the Potomac.

Cinzia knows even less about being a maid than Tom knows about being a parent - now that I think of it, she seems to do a lot of the parenting while he does a substantial amount of the housework.  

So, there's the premise.  The houseboat has to be fixed up, the motherless children nurtured, and Tom and Cinzia have to fall for one another.  Oh, there's competition in the form of Tom's late wife's sister, but does anyone watch a movie starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren and not know from the git-go who is going to wind up with whom? 

But still, there's a certain quaint charm - there are convertibles and country clubs, and Cary Grant playing... that character that Cary Grant always plays.  Could be worse.

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