Sitting Pretty

Hummingbird Hill in deepest suburbia, and stressed-out parents Young and O'Hara have seen their three brats run a succession of domestics out of the house. Their pleas for help are, however, met by the unlikeliest saviour, self-confessed genius and all-round efficiency expert Webb, who takes no nonsense whatever from the little devils and soon has a semblance of harmony restored, until the real reason for his presence in the household is revealed. Webb, the caustic Waldo Lydecker in Preminger's classic Laura, showed the sharpness of his comic touch in this occasionally acid, genuinely funny portrait of manners and mores in the middle-American home, and proved so popular with audiences that Fox brought back his Lynn Belvedere character for a couple of sequels, Mr Belvedere Goes to College and Mr Belvedere Rings the Bell.