Take Her, She's Mine

I mentioned yesterday that Designing Woman is airing tomorrow afternoon on TCM. Up against it over on FXM is Take Her, She's Mine, which starts at 1:20 PM Thursday.

James Stewart plays Frank Michaelson, a California lawyer who is in trouble with some board he's on, as the chairman, Ivor (John McGiver) produces a bunch of embarrassing newspaper stories complete with pictures. Frank has a chance to defend himself, which means cue the flashback....

Frank is married to Anne (Audrey Meadows), with two daughters, the elder of whom, Mollie (Sandra Dee) is graduating high school, which means she's of an age to go away to college, and the age where she's noticing boys, the latter of which is far more concerning to Frank because he doesn't want his sweet young virginial daughter to get into trouble.

Good luck with that Frank. Mollie goes to an all-woman's college in the Boston area where Harvard men and others are always nearby. Mollie starts to rebel, singing bad 1960s folk music in a beatnik bar attended by Gilligan (er, Bob Denver), and protesting the injustices of the world. It's the latter that gets her in trouble, and sends Frank off to Boston to find out what exactly is going on. The college students are involved in a sit-in over a banned novel, and Frank winds up being a sort of defense lawyer to them during the sit-in, which gets him arrested and the first headline.

Mollie gets expelled from college for her activities, but is lucky enough to get an art scholarship to study in Paris! This will also give her an opportunity to spend more time with Henri (Philippe Fourquet), whom she met at college and who is of course French. Of course, it's going to mean more trouble for Frank. The heartburn escalates when Mollie says she's in Life magazine, for a radical painting she did.

So Frank goes off to France, where he finds that Mollie and Henri are really in love, but that there's also a problem in that Henri's parents aren't so certain they want the marriage to go forward. Also in Paris, Frank meets Mr. Pope-Jones (Robert Morley), a British expat who has adult children of his own and who tells Frank to forget about trying to reform Mollie. Pope-Jones also gets Frank into some more trouble at a big arts party....

Take Her, She's Mine is one of the earlier of what I'd call the "generation gap" movies, having been released just before the shooting of President Kennedy really changed America, a fact that's evidenced by the beatnik club which I always though was really a think from the end of the 1950s. It's also gentler and not trying to pander as hard as many of the later generation gap movies.

But it's still not without its problems, as not all that much really happens and poor James Stewart gets embarrassed by all those antics he has to go through. Audrey Meadows is underused, and Morley's know-it-all Brit is just irritating. One thing the movie has going for it is the epilogue, although of course you have to wait until the end of the movie to get there. I'm glad I watched this, but it's not the first James Stewart movie I'd recommend to be people by a long shot.

Take Her, She's Mine is available on DVD both as a standalone and as part of a three-film collection of Stewart's movies at Fox.