Brotherly love and 'Love's Brother'

As the soundtrack swells relentlessly to all-purpose Mediterranean strains, 'Love's Brother' (Jan Sardi, 2004) gives every sign of being not merely set in the 1950s but made then as well. We are back, it is tempting to think, in the world of some big, glutinous Twentieth Century Fox romance for the new CinemaScope screen; the world of, say, 'Three Coins in the Fountain' (Jean Negulesco, 1954). And so, up to a point, we are; though I don't mean by this to write off the film as a throwback dud.