Post by Eddie Love on Sept 17, 2011 10:09:20 GMT -5
It may seem odd today, but when I was growing up – even though she’d gone into retirement by this time – Doris Day still seemed to loom large over the show business landscape. She was a major force in movies and American entertainment generally, something like a distaff Elvis or Frank. Her films and music were ubiquitous, even if few of them would necessarily be regarded as classics today. I’m sure she’s noted still for her career as well as her later activism. But the heat around her and what she represented back in the day (pun intended) may not be simple to convey.
If there’s something that’d be considered a type of Doris Day movie – they’re the comedies she made with Rock Hudson (three in all) each with the great Tony Randall as the third wheel. As the 60s wore on, DD swapped out other co-stars for Hudson, like James Garner and Rod Taylor. And as the decade (and her film career) neared an end she (or her shady, hustling, husband-manager) took advantage of the spy craze to star her in two spoofs that arrived in the wake of 007. Neither is particularly good, but both serve as curious reminders of this bygone superstar.
The first is THE GLASS BOTTOM BOAT from 1966 and directed by Frank Tashlin, the anarchic stylist who worked as a Warner Brothers animator and helmed some of the best of the Martin and Lewis and later just Jerry vehicles. The plot, which incidentally has virtually nothing whatever to do with a glass-bottom boat, concerns Doris as a widow who works in the PR department at a giant NASA installation in California. (Was there such a thing?) The outfit’s hotshot inventor of some-sort-of-fancy-space-thing (Rod Taylor) takes a shine to Doris and asks her to write his press biography as a ruse to get with her. Unfortunately, a nosy security guard at the facility (Paul Lynde) decides (based on one elaborately convoluted misunderstanding) that Doris is, in fact, a Soviet spy! When she realizes she’s under investigation, and that her new beau Rod suspects her as well, DD strings along NASA, the Army and the CIA in a manner which recently might have gotten her summarily shipped off to Guantanamo.
The feel and setting of this picture is garishly sit-commie. With the exception of Taylor’s oh-so-modern kitchen, replete with computerized machines that do the cooking and robots that clean up afterward, the physical look of things is identical to most TV comedies of the time. And the broad, generic strokes extend to the performers as well, there’s talent on display, but the showcase of it is pretty wan. All told, there’s some fairly strong comic supporting players, chiefly Paul Lynde. He’s never been gayer and even dons drag in one scene. Also on hand is Dick Martin who has a couple amusing bits, but the material doesn’t support these guys as best it could. This includes Dom Deluise (I never realized his career stretched back this far) who has a looooooong protracted and unfunny slapstick bit with Doris that serves mainly to point out how game she was with the physical shtick. (And, to be a pig about it, the sequence also showcases her really nice ass. There. Someone had to say it…) One of the best features of the picture is the turn by Rod Taylor as the male lead, what a terrific star he was, a rugged charmer with an effortless command of the screen. I’ll watch anything with him in it.
Frank Tashlin was known for a wild anything goes sensibility and he’s more restrained (or possibly bored) here. Except for the aforementioned cross-dressing and knowingly subtle gay asides, things are pretty tame. But he does have a smooth way with the camera and while, there may be a formulaic TV sensibility to the script and setting you do realize at all times that you’re watching an actual movie. (I can’t say the same for the cinematically flat Flint movies.)
For a movie that’s watchable, if not especially good, this has one remarkable scene. Doris takes Rod to dinner at her father’s house – he’s the skipper of the titular vessel and played by Arthur Godfrey. Sitting around the table, he and Doris sing the film’s irritating, tacky, yet catchy, title song that’s essentially the same melody as Hush, Little Baby with a dash of Cole Porter’s Did You Evah thrown in for good measure. One assumes this is a song Doris’ character is familiar with, but as she and Godfrey run through it she muffs the lyrics repeatedly and the cast is clearly, unaffectedly amused. Nobody seems to be in character and Doris herself looks off-camera acknowledging the error even as she and Godfrey keep going. This all seems completely natural, almost improvised. (But, there are some edits and I doubt they used two cameras.) Whatever it is, the moment feels spontaneous. The two then launch into a version of Day’s signature song Que Sera, Sera with Godfrey accompanying on his ukulele. Today this is what you’d see on the end credits or DVD gag reel. Stuck in the middle of this otherwise dated and kind of lifeless picture, it’s an unaffected surprise. As silly as this movie is, I watched this bit a couple of times over.
This is a weird role in some ways for Doris. They make a big deal about the fact that she’s a widow, so that we all know a woman of her age isn’t a virgin. And we later watch her hand-ringing as she comes to the realization she’s ready to bed down with Rod (so to speak). This decision arrives during a wholly incongruous solo musical number (ala Matt Helm) after which she takes off her wedding ring and heads over to Taylor’s pad. I guess this was considered daring for the time that DD would offer herself up to a suitor without benefit of marriage – perhaps the sexual revolution was timidly poking it’s head into even Doris Day pictures. (What would people have made of her playing Mrs. Robinson as Mike Nichols legendarily first intended?)
Which kind of highlights the crux of this picture’s central weakness. Is this a will-she-give-it-up-or-won’t-she sex comedy or a spy spoof? Doris done up as Mata Hari adorned the poster for this, even though she’s only shown in that outfit for quite literally seconds during a Taylor daydream sequence. Elsewhere, during a party scene Robert Vaughn uncomfortably stands around for an U.N.C.L.E. in-joke, but that’s about it. There’s a lot of running around at the end, but more in the manner of farce than even a lightweight spy caper.
Doris would reteam with Tashlin the following year for an even greater bid for the Bond spoof market with CAPRICE, one of those “sophisticated” one-word-titled romantic thrillers released in the wake of CHARADE and a film that is both better and worse than GBB.
The plot this time around concerns the rather novel subject of industrial espionage. Indeed, years ago this was the film that introduced me to that whole concept and until the recent DUPLICITY (which it in some ways resembles) it was the only film to feature it as a central plot point. Doris is an industrial agent moving between two competing cosmetic firms to get the formula for a hairspray that keeps your hair dry – even coming out of the pool! During this process she romances and falls in and out of allegiance with a male counterpart. (At one point she sardonically refers to herself as “The spy who came in from the cold cream.”)
The male lead is Richard Harris and though he’s occasionally a very fine actor, he can only dream of affecting the kind of nonchalant turn a star like Taylor can offer in this sort of fluff. Though he speaks in his own Irish accent, he’s referred to repeatedly as English, so I guess he couldn’t be bothered to keep it straight himself. Indeed, Harris seems to spend the whole picture convincing us all how wrong he is for this kind of romp. He tosses off impressions of Olivier and Burton as Hamlet, possibly as inside jokes. In any event, they’re a distraction and he has no chemistry with Doris and he comes off as jaded and mean throughout. (Astonishingly, he chose to make this over THE IPCRESS FILE.)
The goings-on here, though played no straighter, are less farcical than the earlier film. The one big comic turn is by Ray Walston as a deranged cosmetic designer and, at times, he’s laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, his performance, especially in an opening scene where he berates Doris, borders on comic genius. It’s played totally straight as he becomes unhinged again and again. This character isn’t developed much after that bit and he never comes close to topping it. Too bad.
CAPRICE is a great looking movie and, as spy spoofs of the time go, it’s stylish and benefits from its unique premise. In filmmaking terms it’s a lot more polished than something like FATHOM, though not nearly as entertaining. Unfortunately, the spy-jinks sit uncomfortably next to some broad comic bits, much of it at the expense of the bumbling Day character, that entirely undercut the notion she’s any kind of adept agent. Like the prior film I’m not sure if Tashlin is phoning it in or restricted by the nature of the assignment. (He was no holds barred a few years earlier with his work on the rarely shown effort to start a Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot franchise: THE ABC MURDERS. That picture is full of over-the-top visual jokes.)
There is one effort to create a Bondman action set piece that involves DD being chased on skis and heading straight for a cliff, that’s rendered partly with doubles and lots of rear projection. It’s not great, but at least they tried. And, possibly as a sop to any men in the audience, like the earlier film, the bachelor pad of the hero is thoroughly tricked out. (As an inside joke to the prior film a picture is shown of Doris’s father and it’s Godfrey.)
Unlike GBB, there’s no coy back-story about Doris being a widow and no bones about the fact that she’s ready to hop in the sack with Harris. All of which works fine. In her early 40s here, the actress has a certain earthy sexiness buried beneath that oddly attractive snow-white helmet of hair. (Elsewhere in the movie, girl-crazy Tashlin gets a lot of mileage out of Walston’s smoking hot Asian secretary prancing around in her bikini.)
CAPRICE has a number of elements that suggest the possibility it could actually have been pretty good. Subsequently, when things don’t come together, you get a little bored and irritated. Not so with the contentedly square GLASS BOTTOM-BOAT, a movie that manages to engage, however slightly, in spite of itself. As artifacts of their time, both illustrate the type of fare that surfaced in the wake of Bond-mania. They also showcase the hard-working talents of a giant star of her day.
If there’s something that’d be considered a type of Doris Day movie – they’re the comedies she made with Rock Hudson (three in all) each with the great Tony Randall as the third wheel. As the 60s wore on, DD swapped out other co-stars for Hudson, like James Garner and Rod Taylor. And as the decade (and her film career) neared an end she (or her shady, hustling, husband-manager) took advantage of the spy craze to star her in two spoofs that arrived in the wake of 007. Neither is particularly good, but both serve as curious reminders of this bygone superstar.
The first is THE GLASS BOTTOM BOAT from 1966 and directed by Frank Tashlin, the anarchic stylist who worked as a Warner Brothers animator and helmed some of the best of the Martin and Lewis and later just Jerry vehicles. The plot, which incidentally has virtually nothing whatever to do with a glass-bottom boat, concerns Doris as a widow who works in the PR department at a giant NASA installation in California. (Was there such a thing?) The outfit’s hotshot inventor of some-sort-of-fancy-space-thing (Rod Taylor) takes a shine to Doris and asks her to write his press biography as a ruse to get with her. Unfortunately, a nosy security guard at the facility (Paul Lynde) decides (based on one elaborately convoluted misunderstanding) that Doris is, in fact, a Soviet spy! When she realizes she’s under investigation, and that her new beau Rod suspects her as well, DD strings along NASA, the Army and the CIA in a manner which recently might have gotten her summarily shipped off to Guantanamo.
The feel and setting of this picture is garishly sit-commie. With the exception of Taylor’s oh-so-modern kitchen, replete with computerized machines that do the cooking and robots that clean up afterward, the physical look of things is identical to most TV comedies of the time. And the broad, generic strokes extend to the performers as well, there’s talent on display, but the showcase of it is pretty wan. All told, there’s some fairly strong comic supporting players, chiefly Paul Lynde. He’s never been gayer and even dons drag in one scene. Also on hand is Dick Martin who has a couple amusing bits, but the material doesn’t support these guys as best it could. This includes Dom Deluise (I never realized his career stretched back this far) who has a looooooong protracted and unfunny slapstick bit with Doris that serves mainly to point out how game she was with the physical shtick. (And, to be a pig about it, the sequence also showcases her really nice ass. There. Someone had to say it…) One of the best features of the picture is the turn by Rod Taylor as the male lead, what a terrific star he was, a rugged charmer with an effortless command of the screen. I’ll watch anything with him in it.
Frank Tashlin was known for a wild anything goes sensibility and he’s more restrained (or possibly bored) here. Except for the aforementioned cross-dressing and knowingly subtle gay asides, things are pretty tame. But he does have a smooth way with the camera and while, there may be a formulaic TV sensibility to the script and setting you do realize at all times that you’re watching an actual movie. (I can’t say the same for the cinematically flat Flint movies.)
For a movie that’s watchable, if not especially good, this has one remarkable scene. Doris takes Rod to dinner at her father’s house – he’s the skipper of the titular vessel and played by Arthur Godfrey. Sitting around the table, he and Doris sing the film’s irritating, tacky, yet catchy, title song that’s essentially the same melody as Hush, Little Baby with a dash of Cole Porter’s Did You Evah thrown in for good measure. One assumes this is a song Doris’ character is familiar with, but as she and Godfrey run through it she muffs the lyrics repeatedly and the cast is clearly, unaffectedly amused. Nobody seems to be in character and Doris herself looks off-camera acknowledging the error even as she and Godfrey keep going. This all seems completely natural, almost improvised. (But, there are some edits and I doubt they used two cameras.) Whatever it is, the moment feels spontaneous. The two then launch into a version of Day’s signature song Que Sera, Sera with Godfrey accompanying on his ukulele. Today this is what you’d see on the end credits or DVD gag reel. Stuck in the middle of this otherwise dated and kind of lifeless picture, it’s an unaffected surprise. As silly as this movie is, I watched this bit a couple of times over.
This is a weird role in some ways for Doris. They make a big deal about the fact that she’s a widow, so that we all know a woman of her age isn’t a virgin. And we later watch her hand-ringing as she comes to the realization she’s ready to bed down with Rod (so to speak). This decision arrives during a wholly incongruous solo musical number (ala Matt Helm) after which she takes off her wedding ring and heads over to Taylor’s pad. I guess this was considered daring for the time that DD would offer herself up to a suitor without benefit of marriage – perhaps the sexual revolution was timidly poking it’s head into even Doris Day pictures. (What would people have made of her playing Mrs. Robinson as Mike Nichols legendarily first intended?)
Which kind of highlights the crux of this picture’s central weakness. Is this a will-she-give-it-up-or-won’t-she sex comedy or a spy spoof? Doris done up as Mata Hari adorned the poster for this, even though she’s only shown in that outfit for quite literally seconds during a Taylor daydream sequence. Elsewhere, during a party scene Robert Vaughn uncomfortably stands around for an U.N.C.L.E. in-joke, but that’s about it. There’s a lot of running around at the end, but more in the manner of farce than even a lightweight spy caper.
Doris would reteam with Tashlin the following year for an even greater bid for the Bond spoof market with CAPRICE, one of those “sophisticated” one-word-titled romantic thrillers released in the wake of CHARADE and a film that is both better and worse than GBB.
The plot this time around concerns the rather novel subject of industrial espionage. Indeed, years ago this was the film that introduced me to that whole concept and until the recent DUPLICITY (which it in some ways resembles) it was the only film to feature it as a central plot point. Doris is an industrial agent moving between two competing cosmetic firms to get the formula for a hairspray that keeps your hair dry – even coming out of the pool! During this process she romances and falls in and out of allegiance with a male counterpart. (At one point she sardonically refers to herself as “The spy who came in from the cold cream.”)
The male lead is Richard Harris and though he’s occasionally a very fine actor, he can only dream of affecting the kind of nonchalant turn a star like Taylor can offer in this sort of fluff. Though he speaks in his own Irish accent, he’s referred to repeatedly as English, so I guess he couldn’t be bothered to keep it straight himself. Indeed, Harris seems to spend the whole picture convincing us all how wrong he is for this kind of romp. He tosses off impressions of Olivier and Burton as Hamlet, possibly as inside jokes. In any event, they’re a distraction and he has no chemistry with Doris and he comes off as jaded and mean throughout. (Astonishingly, he chose to make this over THE IPCRESS FILE.)
The goings-on here, though played no straighter, are less farcical than the earlier film. The one big comic turn is by Ray Walston as a deranged cosmetic designer and, at times, he’s laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, his performance, especially in an opening scene where he berates Doris, borders on comic genius. It’s played totally straight as he becomes unhinged again and again. This character isn’t developed much after that bit and he never comes close to topping it. Too bad.
CAPRICE is a great looking movie and, as spy spoofs of the time go, it’s stylish and benefits from its unique premise. In filmmaking terms it’s a lot more polished than something like FATHOM, though not nearly as entertaining. Unfortunately, the spy-jinks sit uncomfortably next to some broad comic bits, much of it at the expense of the bumbling Day character, that entirely undercut the notion she’s any kind of adept agent. Like the prior film I’m not sure if Tashlin is phoning it in or restricted by the nature of the assignment. (He was no holds barred a few years earlier with his work on the rarely shown effort to start a Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot franchise: THE ABC MURDERS. That picture is full of over-the-top visual jokes.)
There is one effort to create a Bondman action set piece that involves DD being chased on skis and heading straight for a cliff, that’s rendered partly with doubles and lots of rear projection. It’s not great, but at least they tried. And, possibly as a sop to any men in the audience, like the earlier film, the bachelor pad of the hero is thoroughly tricked out. (As an inside joke to the prior film a picture is shown of Doris’s father and it’s Godfrey.)
Unlike GBB, there’s no coy back-story about Doris being a widow and no bones about the fact that she’s ready to hop in the sack with Harris. All of which works fine. In her early 40s here, the actress has a certain earthy sexiness buried beneath that oddly attractive snow-white helmet of hair. (Elsewhere in the movie, girl-crazy Tashlin gets a lot of mileage out of Walston’s smoking hot Asian secretary prancing around in her bikini.)
CAPRICE has a number of elements that suggest the possibility it could actually have been pretty good. Subsequently, when things don’t come together, you get a little bored and irritated. Not so with the contentedly square GLASS BOTTOM-BOAT, a movie that manages to engage, however slightly, in spite of itself. As artifacts of their time, both illustrate the type of fare that surfaced in the wake of Bond-mania. They also showcase the hard-working talents of a giant star of her day.
