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.

Take Her, She's Mine

Take Her, She's Mine
November 13, 1963
Fox
Comedy, Musical
VHS
B-

Inspired by the play by the Ephrons, who in turn were inspired by daughter Nora's letters home from college, this provides an early look at what would in a few years be known as the generation gap.  Yes, earlier movies showed parents dealing with their high-school and college-age children (including not only Dee's Gidget but Stewart's It's a Wonderful Life).  But this one shows some very '60s-specific issues, particularly in Mollie's (Dee's) freshman year, when she embraces protest and folk music.

But her father, Frank Michaelson, played by Stewart, is more worried about the college men she may be embracing.  Although there are some borderline tasteless moments, overall the film offers a sweet if very dated look at a man dealing with "the awakening of sex in his daughter."  Her dad not only wants Mollie to stay a virgin, but he believes that a woman's ultimate happiness is through marriage.  Mollie, despite her social consciousness and her interest in modern art, ends up marrying a rich, handsome, young Frenchman, and that presumably is enough for her happy ending.  (At 19!  But the average age for women marrying for the first time in '63 was 21.)  How this differs from a '50s film-- other than of course Wilder's Sabrina-- is that it's not clear that Mollie keeps her V-card until the wedding night, and ultimately it doesn't really matter.  And if she has had sex with her French boyfriend, at least she doesn't seem to be pressured into it, after being ogled, hit on, and even harassed by various men, including her high school art teacher!  The variations on this theme of the protective dad's "dish" daughter would play out as the '60s moved on and American cinema tried to cope, particularly in Bob Hope "sex comedies."

We get a bit of Mollie's perspective, although the movie is mostly told in Mr. Michaelson's flashbacks.  I'm using the "musical" tag because Dee shows she can sing and dance in a few different numbers, although she's not showcased in the way she'll be in Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!  (That's the movie where I most often reinterpret the Grease lyrics, "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity," because she is lousy at dealing with her screen "virtue," particularly in that film.)  Here she sings not only folk but a French song, as well as dancing the can-can.  She's accompanied on the guitar very briefly by everybody's favorite TV beatnik Bob Denver, not yet transitioned to goofy Gilligan.  Equally scene-stealing is the ever quotable Robert Morley.  (While everyone else keeps mistaking Mr. Michaelson for Jimmy Stewart, ha ha, Morley's Mr. Pope-Jones is convinced Frank looks like Henry Fonda.)

Eugene Borden also played a Frenchman in All About Eve, as did Marcel Hillaire in Sabrina (as the professor at the cooking school).  Jack Chefe was in Please Don't Eat the Daisies.  Harry Carter, Pitt Herbert, Gene O'Donnell, and Charles Robinson would be in Dear Brigitte with Stewart.  (Henry Koster would again direct, but Nunnally Johnson would be uncredited for his work on that script.)  Irene Tsu (Miss Wu here) and Jane Wald would do John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!  James Brolin, who's one of the boys greeting Mollie at the airport when she first goes off to college (he was then 23), would be in both movies.  Cynthia Pepper would be in Miss Congeniality 2.  

Gidget

Gidget
April 10, 1959
Columbia
Comedy, Drama, Musical
VHS
B-

Almost 17-year-old Sandra Dee* plays the turning-17 title character (girl + midget).  This is the granddaddy of surf/beach movies, so we first see the-leads-surfing-against-rear-projection-waves mixed in with stunt surfers in long shots, and first hear a lot more talk about than practice of sex among the beach crowd.  This is based on the first of the Gidget books (which were in turn based on the author's daughter).  I've read only one of the books, and my review is here: http://rereadingeverybookiown.blogspot.com/2012/07/affairs-of-gidget.html.  The movies are apparently very different than the books, and I suspect the moral lessons that the mother gently passes on were not in the first novel.  When I first saw the movie in my early teens, I could relate to the pressure to have a boyfriend, and it wasn't till years later that it occurred to me that Gidget's boyish friend Betty Louise's initials may've stood for something else, fraternity pin or not.  Watching it now, I find Cliff Robertson a hell of a lot more attractive than cold fish James Darren, even when the latter is singing love songs.  Darren nonetheless would return as Moondoggie in the sequels, though the Gidgets would change.

Joby Baker is the only other member of the cast who would do the two film sequels, although his character's nickname would change from Stinky to Judge.  Paul Wendkos would stay on as director.  This film also features a 21-year-old Yvonne Craig (Batgirl) as one of Gidget's more buxom pals; and future Billy Jack, Tom Laughlin, as Loverboy.  Mary LaRoche, Gidget's sympathetic mom, would be in The Swinger.  (I don't own Bye Bye Birdie, but that's a very different Ann-Margret film she did.)  Four Preps member Bruce Belland would write "He's Gonna Make It" for The Barefoot Executive.  And, yes, orchestrator John Williams, Jr. is that John Williams.


*Dee's mother may have lied about Sandra's age, making her 15 in 1959.  In any case, she looks much younger than everyone else.