Just perfect...

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Robert Morley once was asked why he was in so many garbage pictures. To wit he replied, "For the money dear boy". One has to ask how come Morley missed John Goldfarb, Please Come Home because if there ever was a "for the money" picture this was it for so many others. I doubt you will ever find as many talented people this side of the first Casino Royale film involved in such a disaster of a film. This is one unfunny Cold War satire with a rare laugh or two there. The laughs come at a bunch of people looking ridiculous.The title role is played by Richard Crenna who was then trying to get a career going on the big screen at the time. He plays Wrong Way Goldfarb who was a famous college halfback made famous for running the wrong way covering the field at a college bowl game.He hasn't improved his sense of direction any as he pilots his U-2 spy plane over the Middle East kingdom of Fawz and it comes down there with him taken alive. When King Peter Ustinov learns who he is he decides to keep Crenna and make him an offer to coach a football team he's organizing for his son. He's already built a football stadium in the middle of the desert. The son Patrick Adiarte was kicked out of Notre Dame and off the football team. Why didn't he just buy Notre Dame?This of course has set off a crisis in Washington because they want to get the plane back with Crenna as an afterthought. On the ground in Fawz is Shirley MacLaine as a reporter working a story she's gotten a whiff of. Maybe she smelled the script.I thought Peter Ustinov looked especially ridiculous speaking in gibberish throughout. I'd love to know how he got into this, did he really need the money?This one's a Cold War stinker.

John Goldfarb, Please Come Home is a movie that the whole family can watch and will appeal to older children until the age of 14 and adults 30 and up. Those in-between might not enjoy it as much. It is an amusing movie with little plot. The acting is good. The humor is good and old school. It is a prime time movie. However, there is little substance to the movie. Yet, there is not supposed to be any, just funny. There are a lot of good actors/actresses in the movie to make it funny and serious enough to stay funny and silly. Laughter is the best medicine, or so they say -- so enjoy this medicine for the soul. It is a crazy film. Bring plenty of popcorn and family or friends to enjoy this old school funny movie. No depth, no substance, just crazy laughter.

An absurdist romp that tries mightily to spoof the cold war, US-Arab relations, football, religion, and about a thousand other things. It's not altogether successful, but it's also far from being dull. Shirley MacLaine is a reporter who goes undercover to do a story on harem life in a fictional middle eastern country ruled by kooky Peter Ustinov. Ustinov's son has recently been cut from the Notre Dame football team. MacLaine runs into pilot Richard Crenna (a one-time football player known as wrong way Goldfarb). Now a US spy, Crenna's plane crashes in the same country. Shenanegans ensue as Ustinov decides to start a football team to take on the fighting Irish. Crenna is enlisted to coach, setting off an international incident. The actors are all out of control, with MacLaine screaming her dialog and Ustinov acting more like the village idiot than an Arabian sultan. The supporting cast consists of virtually every comic actor working in the mid 60s: Harry Morgan, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Richard Deacon, Jackie Coogan, Wilfred Hyde White. Directed, with his usually heavy hand, by J. Lee Thompson.

Two sorts of minds watch "John Goldfarb"--"realists" who regard the movie as a satirical send-up of U.S. public-interest postmodernists, and "surrealists" who regard the surrealized Establishment in the U.S. as realistic and miss the movie's point. Since I am the leader of the first group, I regard "Goldfarb" as one of the funniest satires ever made. The behavior of Establishment types throughout the film is consonant with and nearly as inane as their real-life performances before or since 1965. The plot involves a man dogged by cosmic bad luck, John Goldfarb, dubbed "Wrong Way" by a female reporter after an unfortunate football play some years earlier. A U-2 pilot for the USAF, he meets the same reporter, while going the wrong way in a Washington building. He takes off on a secret mission over Russia, she is forced by her editor to take on an un-feminist assignment: to get the lowdown on girls being smuggled into a Middle Eastern harem, belonging to king Fawz of Fawzia. The third thread of the story is the need to placate oil-rich U.S.ally Fawz after our ambassador sends him pigskin luggage for his anniversary and his son is dropped from Notre Dame's football team, and complains the coach did it because he is Arab, not Irish. The three strands become a tangled knot when his instruments fail and Goldfarb lands not in Russia but in Fawzia, when his fuel runs out. And, of course, he is recruited by Fawz--to train an Arab football team that can defeat Notre Dame and avenge the insult to his son...Goldfarb tries to hold out, shows the King film of Notre Dame's powerful college squad but cannot dissuade him. The King then bribes him with a harem girl; he recognizes Jenny, the girl reporter; she is now trapped in the harem, having been told Fawz is too old for sex but having been singled out for attention by the lecherous king. He chooses her from among a group of eager dancers, to Fawz's displeasure; and they set up housekeeping in a room of the palace; every few hours, a golden toy train goes by, and Fawz asks, "Are you still happy with her?". This Goldfarb nominates (classically) as "dittahowatrola", since a victrola is playing on the train, while a camera snaps flash pictures and a penguin is carried by. He trains a team, finally, to get to go home. Of course they are a disaster--until he recruits Bedouin warriors as college students: "Our country right or wrong," he murmurs. Then it's the turn of the government which lost him in the first place to try to deal with his disappearance; they put ads in newspapers, "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home". And the State Department has to convince the head of Notre Dame to allow his team to play the Arab squad, no easy task. The game is played; and the party that precedes it and the game have become cinematic classics. This is a sexy, spirited and often intelligent romp with only the utter ineptitude of the U.S.'s State Department types as its parody element; it has marvelous satire of Republican governmental methods and sly jabs at every group concerned. Directed with style by J. Lee Thompson, the film boasts set decorations by Stuart A. Reiss and Walter M. Scott, lovely costumes by Adele Balkan, Edith Head and Ray Aghayan, bright cinematography by legendary Leon Shamroy, art direction by Dale Hennesy and Jack Martin Smith. The cast included Richard Crenna as the "crooked astronaut 'Wrong Way' Goldfarb, Pete Ustinov hamming delightfully as the King, Shirley Maclaine trying hard as a frigid girl reporter, Fred Clark, Harry Morgan, Jim Backus, Richard Deacon, David Lewis, and Milton Frome as the government hacks, plus Telly Savalas, Leon Askin, Jerome Cowan, Charles Lane, Jerry Ohrbach, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Patrick Adiarte as the Prince, Scott Brady as Notre Dame's Coach, Jackie Coogan as the University's beleaguered Chancellor, Angela Douglas, Nai Bonet, Irene Tsu and Sultanna as harem girls and now-familiar actors in smaller roles. The film has a fun situation, color, laughs and pretty girls. When Fred Clark pulls the pin on a place destroyed by a cobalt bomb and wonders, "Thulia Oman?", we know we are dealing with a realistic portrayal our state department. Music by John Williams, state department types named Subtle Overreach and Miles Whitepaper--this may be Hollywood but it's as near as the latest headline.