Giorgio Capitani's Lobster for Breakfast represents the quintessential Italian door-slamming bedroom comedy -- the subgenre in its purest form. This means 96 minutes of unbridled, off-the-wall lunacy -- characters losing their clothes, switching clothes, switching sexual partners, streaking naked through rooms full of dinner guests, destroying entire rooms of furniture, running from vicious guard dogs, falling into swimming pools, and pretty much everything else (including the bathroom sink) thrown into a goofy-headed ambrosia of scattershot gags. This is a textbook case.
For about the first 30 minutes, Capitani (via delicately handled cross-cutting) appears to be setting up a premise not unlike Francis Veber's hilarious 1998 farce, The Dinner Game, whereby an eminent and polished gentleman with a massive superiority complex will unwittingly have his vision of a perfect night (with a blonde, mattress-digging Swedish airline stewardess for whom most men would lose an arm) violated in unimaginable ways by the appearance of an unforeseen third party -- a bumbling, hapless loser. We think we know where the picture is headed. But instead, Capitani skirts around this option, brings in additional characters, and winds up with something much closer to a retread of Blake Edwards' 1968 The Party, with the bawdiness quotient upped and a handful of topless shots thrown in. The picture never comes anywhere near the comic heights of The Dinner Game or The Party, and it misses as often as it hits, but its primary strength is also its most basic: it never once loses its pleasant veneer and sinks into desperation. At 96 minutes, it's a joy to watch -- thanks in no small part to the lead trio of late-'70s actresses (including an ex-centerfold and a former European beauty pageant queen and Bond girl), who so transcend beauty that they enter the surreal category. All-in-all, Lobster for Breakfast is a breezy, fun-filled romp -- and utterly undeserving of the obscurity that cloaks it.