BEDTIME STORY: I've heard this one before

The most extraordinary thing about BEDTIME STORY is the performance of Marlon Brando.
This is not the tortured, angry, mumbling, method acting Brando of the 1950s, nor is it the increasingly fat, middle aged, mumbling, method acting Brando of the 70s.

This 1964 release features a still handsome, clearly spoken, non-method acting Marlon Brando making his first foray into comedy, and it really is a weird experience. I just didn't expect to see him being so normal, tossing off punchlines and mugging like Jerry Lewis, in a part which could have been played by any number of good looking, marginally talented light comedians.
He and David Niven play a couple of conmen who earn their living by seducing the ladies. Niven uses his suave English charms to separate older females from their fortune while Brando specialises in luring younger girls into bed with promises of marriage and then abandoning them when he's had his way. 
When Brando horns in on Niven's territory on the French Riviera the two team up at first (with Brando playing Niven's idiot brother) but then fall out over fabulously wealthy "soap queen" Janet Walker (Shirley Jones). To settle their differences the two men agree that whoever is first to get $25,000 out of Ms Walker will become 'king of the mountain' while the loser leaves town.
If the plot sounds vaguely familiar - it is. BEDTIME STORY was remade in 1988 as "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" with Michael Caine and Steve Martin. Brando's interpretation of retarded stupidity is tame compared to Martin's gross-out version, but it's still odd watching a man regarded by many as the greatest movie actor of all time hamming furiously as he pretends to careen downhill in an out-of-control wheelchair.
Brando looks neither convincing nor comfortable in the part, and he would have looked embarrassed too if he could have seen the finished product. The story's set on the French Riviera but Brando and Niven never set foot off the Universal studios lot in Los Angeles. Director Ralph Levy chooses instead to stand them in front of some of the most unconvincing back projected footage I've ever seen. A pair of obvious stand-ins are used for the few shots actually filmed in France. 
This kind of lazy filmmaking insults the audience's intelligence. It assumes we'll be so overawed by the superstar charisma pulsating from the screen that we won't notice the weak script and shoddy production values. Rob Reiner tried the same trick with "The Bucket List" using the star power of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to try and distract us from noticing how bad his film was. He should have learned from BEDTIME STORY. Even cinema legends can't polish a turd.