Boy on a Dolphin gave American audiences their first look at Sophia Loren back in 1957. And what a look it was. Believe us when we say that Jacqueline Bissett and her wet T-shirt in The Deep have absolutely nothing on Sophia Loren and her wet dress in this movie. Even with 1950s mores, it's amazing Boy on a Dolphin didn't set off a deluge of wet-dress contests across the country.

That being said, Boy on a Dolphin leaves a lot to be desired. The Sophia Loren character, a Greek a sponge diver, is quite shrill. The plot is simplistic to the point of being juvenile. And the dive scenes seem to have been shot in a tank, giving them a bit of a claustrophobic feel.

The story opens with Loren's character coming across an ancient statue of a boy on a dolphin while freediving for sponges. It's not clear how much of this story is based on reality but the image of a boy on a dolphin was fairly common in ancient Greece. Statues depicted Apollo being carried on a dolphin as a boy. And Greek mythology tells of Poseidon sending a dolphin to rescue his own son from the deck of a sinking ship.

The statue in the movie, though, is recognized as having great value and the question becomes whether Loren's poor but extremely well-nourished character will take the money and run by locating it for an art smuggler, or whether she'll do the right thing and help a museum curator raise it for the Greek people. Of course, she'll fall in love, one way or the other, along the way.

As we said, the story is lame. The surface photography of the Greek islands is more interesting than beautiful -- although it does boggle the mind to watch people casually walking through the Parthenon. And the diving scenes and underwater footage that are sprinkled throughout are fairly uninteresting.

As much as we'd love to, we can't recommend Boy on a Dolphin as a movie, dive or otherwise, worth watching. But if you just want to be dazzled by the sight of Sophia Loren getting wet and doing traditional Greek dances, by all means go for it.