Rate Your Music site also does films....

The teenage girl in that case is played, very well by one Catherine Spaak, who's a largely forgotten French/Italian it-girl of the 1960's and 1970s. She had an amazingly modern basic look, e.g., Here she is on the set of one her movies in 1963:

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Your emphasis, swanstep on Catherine Spaak is where mine cannot be -- the foreign film (but I'm learning.)

But I very much remember Catherine Spaak from my Number Two personal favorite of 1967: Hotel.

Here's my post about 1967 from my "NUmber Twos" thread:

BEGIN

1967

Number One: Wait Until Dark
Number Two: Hotel

Honorable mentions

Hombre
The Graduate
Bonnie and Clyde
The Dirty Dozen
You Only Live Twice
In the Heat of the Night
Tony Rome

END

Its a very personal list. I know that Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are the "seminal" classics of that year. In the Heat of the Night was a timely(if gritty) racial film that one Best Picture. The Dirty Dozen was a huge hit -- with a stupendous action finale(just behind the end of The Wild Bunch in my book.)

But there was something about Hotel.

I saw it at a movie theater and the way it started -- with a lush, sad romantic orchestral theme over a painting over which the camera moved showing all the guests in all the windows in all the rooms -- kinda hooked me.

The film was from the best seller by Arthur Hailey and he would soon write Airport and succeed even more in book and film. But THIS one was smaller scale, more much more sophisticated and better acted than Airport.

Hotel starred Rod Taylor(that cool second tier 60's lead from The Birds) as the young hotel manager, portrayed in a tough and touching surrogate father-son relationship with hotel owner Melvyn Douglas that has always stuck with me through time: how the young man honors the old man, how the old man depends on the young man, etc.

As with Grand Hotel before it, Hotel mixed and matched several stories with characters who don't know each other from story to story. The film climaxes with a "hanging by a thread" elevator sequence. Plenty of suspense and then the elevator plunges -- and kills the one character who HAS to die for his story to end correctly. A bit contrived but...emotionally right.

I probably liked Hotel for the Hitchcockian set-piece of the elevator sequence, and Karl Malden had a near-silent role as a funny hotel key thief who gets chased hither and yon but always escapes. That was a bit Htichcock, too.

The rest was simply drama. And in one of the stories. a hotel tycoon played by Kevin McCarthy comes to try to takeover the hotel(by friendly force) and brings his French mistress along.

Ta-DA: Catherine Spaak.

I fell a little in love with her as a pre-teen, I always fall in love with her again when I watch the movie today. She's the wonderful focus of the film's final scene , filmed Rear Window style as New Orleans -jazz"When the Saints Come Marching In" plays on the soundtrack. The movie has a sad ending about the hotel's closure, which gets kind of happy when Spaak reunites with Taylor.

I was reading film reviews at that age, and I recall that Time magazine(much respected) gave Hotel a good review for its craft and professionalism and poignancy: "A hotel you will hate to check out of." Bosley Crowther of the NYT liked it.

My friends and family sometimes remind me that I was "born too late." Liking Hitchcock and Sinatra and movies like Hotel was liking things of "the generation before me." So be it. I liked that kind of quality, and "suave" and craftsmanship. Hey, I liked the shambling documentary style movies of the 70's, too. Just like I liked Led Zepplin as much as Sinatra.

And watching Hotel at a pre-teen age, it had me wondering about how my own career would go -- could I do the job as well as Rod Taylor does it here?("James Bond with a day job," one wag noted.) And wouldn't that be nice to entertain Catherine Spaak -- stripped down to a tasteful slip -- in my swinging bachelor pad? I had to wait to find out.

I read an article the other day about key films of 1967, and amazingly, Hotel was on the list. But with a backhanded compliment: "The kind of all-star cast you get when you can't get an all-star cast." I dunno. Malden and Douglas were Oscar winners. I suppose Rod Taylor got the lead after Paul Newman and Rock Hudson said no but...he's quite good (he always was.) The view saluted Hotel as a swan song for old-time Hollywood storytelling. (With a black civil rights twist in its New Orleans setting, I might add. Plus a stripper -- you didn't see THAT in 1939.)

And given how many times I"ve watched that movie over the decades...I am very, very, VERY qcquainted with Catherine Spaak.