DMH Spotlight - Suzanne Pleshette in If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium Back
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During the summer of 1968, Diana Mara Henry was between her Junior and Senior year at Radcliffe College in Cambridge (now Harvard.) Her summer job was being the "Publicity Assistant" on the United Artists' Production of If It's Tuesday, this Must Be Belgium directed by Mel Stuart with a star-studded cast (including Michael Constantine, Mary Ingels, Donovan, Elsa Martinelli, Sandy Baron, Ian McShane (playing Suzanne's "love interest"), Mildred Natwick, Peggy Cass, all of whom she photographed.... Although at first, being a publicity assistant in theory meant staying in the hotel rooms during the day while the other members of the Publicity Unit were out galivanting around Luxemburg, England, Belgium, the Rhine Valley, Rome and Venice (film production bypassed France because of the student riots that summer), she pretty quickly liberated herself from the Gesttetner machine and went out on set. She may even be a blur in the scene in Venice, dancing by the canal. Suzanne Pleshette, who died of lung cancer, was obviously a smoker, as you can see from the pack of cigarettes in front of her on the vanity. She also sometimes appeared with a black eye or bruises, and it was whispered that she was a victim of domestic violence. She always was gracious and somewhat reclusive, apart from her professional approach to her work. "May her memory be a blessing she was so beautiful. Love, Leah" - Rabbi Leah Novick.

"A mid-1960s TV documentary special (and a New Yorker cartoon before that) was the inspiration for If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. The film is a likeable satire of "packaged" European tours, where the nonplused tourists are expected to rush from one landmark to another in a breathless 18 days. Ian McShane stars as the amorous tour guide, with Suzanne Pleshette as the American department store buyer he falls for; their romance ends when Pleshette decides that the supposedly worldly McShane is too immature for her. An all-star cast, including Murray Hamilton, Peggy Cass, Pamela Britton, Marty Ingels, John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica, pops up in comic cameo roles. Our favorite bit: an American and German tourist, simultaneously regaling their respective wives with wildly divergent accounts of the same wartime confrontation." From the review on MissedMovies.com
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