Mel Harris is Jordan Kirkland, a divorced New York family history researcher whose Aunt Kitty Ridgewood (Vivien Reis) asks her to find a missing Faberche-egged music box which she believes holds the secret to her orphaned childhood, and is said to be worth $10 millon. Jordan travels to Milan where she meets art expert Nicholas Rostov (Rob Stewart), whose grandmother Natalia believes the music box belongs to her. Jordan is also pursued by Gudran Cooper (Jennifer Dale) who works for Count Borodan (Oliver Tobias) who is also after the box, an anonymous assassin (Bela Jaki).
Harris wears her brown hair in a bob with grey strains, apparently so she can match Stewart's grey hair strands. Stewart is actually a Ken Olin look-alike which creates a reference to Harris' thirtysomething TV series. Harris here looks tanned, wears a French-style black striped white top, and a purple/blue ball gown with Medusa sculptured hair. She looks lovely in reaction to the sight of a messy room, is funny when parodying Nicholas's phraseology and resisting his physicality, supplies a drunken girlish giggle, a silent look of sarcasm to Stewart's `I haven't done anything I have to apologise for', has a slow move to kiss Stewart, but 2 rear views of her mannishly walking and her running in short skirts present her unflatteringly. Jordan isn't Harris at her best, but the fault is as much with the convoluted script and uninspired direction as with her.
Based on the Harlequin book by Laurel Pace, the teleplay by Guy Mullally and Jim Henshaw have multiple observations of Nicholas' `charm', but contextually clever lines are followed by cliches. To Jordan's `I'm having a great European vacation' Nicholas says `I'm scared enough for the both of us', his `Let me explain' is answered by her `And which lie would you like to start with', though `I have an appointment' with `I've been expecting you' is laughably redundant. Jordan doing her make-up in the back seat of a taxi gets a spin from her being able to see she is being followed, but the idea of a proposal is somewhat romantically undermined by the plot resolution.
The narrative being so complicated demands the touch of a strong director, which Michael Kennedy is definitely not, since he also uses unexplained fireworks, though that is preferable to his creeping camera for close-ups.
