Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!

Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!
May 10, 1967
MGM
Comedy, Romance, Musical
VHS
B+

Surprisingly funny (mostly intentionally) and surprisingly sweet story of how a "nice girl" winds up pregnant and unwed, despite not one but four suitors!  Meanwhile, her mother wants her to have a singing career.  Sandra Dee plays the girl, Celeste Holm is well cast as her mother, and George Hamilton, Bill Bixby (as "Dick Bender"), Dwayne Hickman, and the comparatively obscure Dick Kallman play the suitors.  Mort Sahl, then 40 and past his peak, but still hilarious, plays the soft-hearted but cynical and rock-hating club owner.  (I may be wrong, but I think he's the only surviving cast member.)

Besides the way the pregnancy is handled-- more obviously than in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek almost a quarter century earlier but still not too bluntly-- the film shows its era in a few ways.  Yes, the music-- with The Wild Affair as Dee's back-up band!-- and fashions, but also such touches as the coffeehouse Hickman likes to take Dee to (a bit more hippie and less beatnik than the one in Dee's Take Her, She's Mine four years earlier.)  Also, this is probably the first of my movies to have a few Negroes (as they would've been known at the time) in speaking roles, most memorably none other than Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols as Dee's fellow secretary.

I think one reason that this movie seems more intelligent than you'd expect is that it's based on the book of the same name.  It was adapted by Philip Shuken, who would go on to write Speedway, which also stars Bill Bixby.  Christopher Riordan, who's done several of my other teen and post-teen flicks (or as Sahl would say, "post-college, pre-life"), plays a nightclub patron.  Allison McKay, who plays the cigarette girl that Bixby makes out with, would be in the Pufnstuf movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it3Ju9wX3F8

It's pretty clear who done it, what with the fireworks and all.