Four Daughters good, seven daughters better?

I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before but that are coming up soon on TCM. One of them is Raintree County, but that's currently on the schedule for July so I've decided I'm going to blog about it then. But there are two on June 18, which is why the first of them is getting a post already on June 16. That one is Seven Sweethearts, which comes on TCM at 11:30 AM on June 18.

A brief opening includes some doggerel about the Dutch contribution to America, reminding us of the town of Holland, MI, which was founded by Dutch immigrants although as I understand it the demographics have changed significantly since this movie was released in 1942. Then, driving into New Delft, which I guess is supposed to be the stand-in for Holland, is New York photojournalist Henry Taggart (Van Heflin, who had just become a star thanks to his performance in Johnny Eager, although this movie was released before he won the Oscar). He's got an assignment to do a piece on the town's tulip festival, and he's looking for a place to stay.

Unfortunately for him, he winds up talking to somebody who it seems would rather give him the runaround, that being Van Maaster (S.Z. Sakall). Henry first meets Van Maaster sitting in the town square playing his oboe, while other guys in the buildings around the square play the other parts of the piece. It just so happens that Van Maaster owns the local hotel, although he really only advertises it to the people he wants to have stay in the hotel, which seems like a good way to go bankrupt quickly. Fortunately for Henry, Mr. Van Maaster is willing to have him as a guest.

Henry gets shown to his room by one of Van Maaster's daughters, who just happens to have a boy's name, because Dad, wanting a boy, preemptively gave all his kids boys' names before they were born, only for his wife to push out one daughter after another, seven in all. Henry also discovers that this is a rather odd hotel, in that there are guests who haven't paid their bills in months, and all the guests seem as happy as they would be if they were Stepford Guests.

The daughters are all unmarried, because of a family tradition. Even though five of them have boyfriends who anywhere else would be a fiancé already, in the Van Maaster family, the daughters always have to marry in age order. And the oldest daughter, Regina (Marsha Hunt), instead of wanting to get married, wants to go off to New York and become an actress. So she's thrilled that Henry is here, because perhaps he can get her out of town.

It's youngest daughter Billie (Kathryn Grayson), however, who winds up weaving the web around Henry as this magical town grows on him. He and Billie fall in love, although there's a problem in that she doesn't really want to upset the family tradition and get married first. (I also couldn't quite tell how much of an age difference there was between the seven daughters.)

As I watched Seven Sweethearts, I couldn't help but think of the Four Daughters series that Warner Bros. had recently completed. That series worked in part because it was made before World War II came to America, during that latter stages of the Depression when that sort of small-town charm still worked. But also, Four Daughters had a hard edge of drama in no small part thanks to the presence of John Garfield and being done at Warner Bros.

MGM, on the other hand, put Van Heflin into Seven Sweethearts, and seemed to be of the belief that the thing to do with this material was to pour as much of the sentimental gloop as the studio could into the material. Another review I read used the word "cloying", and oh my is Seven Sweethearts nonstop cloy. You wonder why Henry didn't throttle everyone in town on his first day in New Delft.

But then, to make things worse, since they were grooming Kathryn Grayson for stardom, they had to give her a bunch of songs to sing. Her voice doesn't really work for me, and I've always considered her an acquired taste. But her vocal stylings work even less for this sort of movie.

There are going to be people who like Seven Sweethearts. But I'm not one of those people.

The Disintegrated Convict

Another of my recent Blu-ray purchases was a 3-disc box set of Vitagraph Comedies, featuring a bunch of one-reelers from the early days of the studio (I think the earliest is from 1907) through to the late days of the studio after World War I. I recently put Disc 1 into the player, and watched both a brief intro about the films and the set, as well as the first of the shorts, The Disintegrated Convict.

The 2024 intro, produced by Kino Classics, includes a couple of the archivists at the Library of Congress who were responsible for cataloguing, restoring, and selecting the shorts seen in this collection, along with some brief comments about things that surprised them, such as they thought some of the shorts labeled as comedies weren't funny at all, and it wasn't just because the material was dated. This intro runs about 13 minutes and while it doesn't provide a whole lot of information, it's certainly a good-enough general introduction.

As for the short I watched, The Disintegrated Convict, since it's only six minutes and change there's not much plot here. A man gets put into a prison cell, where the cops who brought him in hang him by his wrists so that he can't escape, except that they're stupid enough to leave the door to the cell unlocked so that even if he could somehow get down, he could just walk right out. The man does get down, but in a unique way: he "disintegrates" and rematerializes, which is of course handled with crude special effects; unsurprisingly mention is made in the commentaries of Georges Meliès.

After the prisoner escapes, the police chase him Keystone Kops style, except that this is several years before the Keystone series. Each time, the convict "escapes" by morphing into something different, which is a setup for the various effects and sight gags. This being 1907, there's no real resolution since there's not exactly much plot.

There's a new piano score, as well as a second track with commentary from a British film historian, who intelligently pointed out the first thing I noticed, which is that the prison wall had an extremely noticeable Vitagraph logo on it; this was obviously done to try to deter making bootleg copies since film copyright was handled differently in those days. As I understand it, individual images could be copyrighted and deposited with the Library of Congress.

The packaging for this set is similar to that of the Miklos Jancso collection I mentioned recently, in that each disc gets its own spindle, with two of the discs back-to-back on a hinge that turns like a page; the third disk is on the inside of the back, much like a traditional standalone DVD or Blu-ray. No particular rating of the short; it's interesting enough and I assume the shorts here will be of variable quality with different viewers finding some better/funnier than others.

Father's Day is tomorrow

Tomorrow is the third Sunday in June, which here in the US means Father's Day. Just as TCM celebrates Mother's Day with a lineup of movies looking at mothers, so do they celebrate Father's Day -- and you can probably predict some of the movies that show up.

First, however, we should mention the overnight lineup, since it starts with Noir Alley which gets a repeat during the daytime lineup. This one isn't really a fatherhood-related movie, but James Stewart in the pretty darn good Northside 777 at midnight. I'm trying to think of a good fatherhood-themed noir, but nothing quickly is coming to mind. The rest of the night is a sort of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", as the following movie is another James Stewart film, Vertigo at 2:15 AM. That, in turn, is followed by another Alfred Hitchcock movie, I Confess at 4:30 AM, which I suppose is a different sort of father.

As for the actual Father's Day lineup, it's surprisingly filled with dark movies, more so than the TCM's traditional Mother's Day lineup which doesn't seem to get much darker than Mildred Pierce. The first half of the day is not so bright:
Laurence Olivier having more or less failed as a father in The Entertainer, at 6:15 AM;
Spencer Tracy as another failed father in Edward, My Son, at 8:00 AM, which has the surprising conceit of not actually seeing the son;
The repeat of Call Northside 777 at 10:00 AM; and
James Dean trying to please his father Raymond Massey in East of Eden at 12:15 PM.

The afternoon and even get lighter, with some of the more predictable selections, although the first doesn't show up quite so much:
Daughters Courageous at 2:30 PM, which you could be forgiven for thinking is part of the Warner Bros. series that started with Four Daughters;
A Family Affair, the first of the Andy Hardy movies, at 4:30 PM;
The Courtship of Eddie's Father at 5:45 PM;
Life With Father, the movie we know you were all waiting for on Father's Day, at 8:00 PM; and
Father of the Bride (the 1950 version) at 10:15 PM.

FXM doesn't seem to be doing anything for Father's Day, and mildly humorously has the fun anthology film We're Not Married! at 11:30 AM.

Young Anthony Hopkins

It's only a couple of weeks ago that I blogged about Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, by which time he was quite famous, it being after his first Oscar win. Back in October for Halloween, TCM aired a much earlier Hopkins movie that I hadn't seen before, which sounded interesting, so I recorded it: Magic. Recently, I finally watched it off my DVR.

Hopkins plays Corky, a struggling magician working the nightclub scene in New York; his British accent is explained away by the fact that his parents emigrated to work the Borscht Belt which is how Corky wound up in America. That Catskills upbringing however does come in as a plot point later in the movie. When we first see him, Corky is nervous and despite doing his mentor Merlin's tricks and doing them well, the show flops because of Corky's nerves and lack of delivery. Merlin tells Corky that he needs a gimmick, so he goes off and gets one.

Fast forward some unspecified amount of time, and Corky is back at that same club we first saw him in, only this time his agent Ben (Burgess Meredith), who knows about Corky's new gimmick, shows up with a network representative in tow. Corky starts doing his routine, which looks a lot like the same one he was doing as the movie opened. And that show seems to be bombing just as badly as the first one. So badly, in fact, that a man starts heckling him from the back of the room.

In fact, that's the gimmick. Corky isn't getting into a double act like Martin and Lewis in The Stooge; in fact, the heckler is a ventriloquist's dummy, named Fats, and the idea that Corky can throw his voice that far is impressive in itself. But Fats serves as the distraction a magician needs for his sleight of hand. Corky also gives Fats the persona of an off-color heckler, injecting humor into the routine. Fats turns the show into a success, enough that the guy from the network wants to offer Corky a pilot.

But there's a catch. One of the clauses in the standard contract is that the person getting the pilot needs to do a physical, and Corky is flatly against that, which he says is from principle, but the way it's all presented foreshadows that there's probably something darker going on. Indeed, we've seen Corky carrying on a conversation with Fats with no one else around. Corky runs away heading back for home, except that all his family are dead and gone.

Corky really has another reason for heading back to the Catskills. When he was in school, he had a crush on lovely Peggy Ann (Ann-Margret), and is looking to see her again, stopping at the motel her parents owned. But it's Peggy who's there, having been given control of the motel when her parents left for Florida. But since the Borscht Belt is dying by this time, the business isn't going well and she lives in a loveless marriage with her husband Duke (Ed Lauter).

At this point, the movie starts getting really dark. The voice of Fats inside Corky's head doesn't go away, and when Corky rekindles his relationship with Peggy, going farther than he did in high school, it's not only Duke who has a problem with it; Corky does as well. Fats senses the danger, and things start to spiral out of control from there....

The old horror anthology trope of a ventriloquist's dummy that seems to take on a life of its own has been done a lot of times, but I don't think it's so common that it's been extended out to a full-length film. Magic does it fairly well, helped by an intelligent way of introducing the premise. That, and fairly good performances, especially from Hopkins and Meredith. Magic, for some reason, has fallen through the cracks, and isn't so well remembered today, which is a bit of a surprise considering the star power of the cast. It's definitely one that deserves better, and deserves a watch.

Angel of Color

Another of the noirs that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley that I had never heard of before was the Universal film Black Angel. It sounded interesting, so I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

After some establishing shots of the Universal back lot substituting for Los Angeles, the camera pans to a window which is one in the apartment of Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). After her maid goes out for the evening, she calls down to the doorman, and tells him that if a certain Martin Blair should come asking to go up and see her, the doorman is most emphatically not to let him up. Sure enough Marty (Dan Duryea) comes into the building, claiming to be married to Mavis. The doorman blocks him, but then soon enough for Marty to see it, anothr man, a Marko (Peter Lorre) shows up looking for Mavis, and the doorman lets him right up.

Marty is so ticked off that he goes off and gets stinking drunk, playing the piano at a local dive bar since he's also a musician. He was in fact married to Mavis, but the drinking is why she's left him. So one of Marty's friends takes him home. While Marty is passed out drunk, also going up to Mavis' apartment is Kirk Bennett. He'd been in a relationship with Mavis despite being married to Catherine (June Vincent), and Mavis was blackmailing him, which would explain why Kirk would go up to see Mavis.

The next thing we know, the cops stop by the Bennett place. Capt. Flood (Broderick Crawford) is looking for Kirk, since he was the last person to see Mavis, at least until the maid returned and found that Mavis was really quite dead, having been murdered. The maid also saw Kirk leaving the building, so it's unsurprising that the police would suspect him of the murder. He's put on trial for it, and found guilty. Catherine, however, still believes that he must be innocent. Or, at least, she's acting like she believes that.

Kirk is eventually found guilty, and Catherine decides she's going to spend the rest of her life, or at least until the day of the execution arrives, trying to clear her husband's name. She goes looking for Blair, since to her it seems obvious that he must have killed the wife who dumped him. At least, until she finds out that Marty was really quite drunk at the time Mavis is believed to have been killed, and that a couple of his friends can corrobrate that. He's willing to help Catherine find out who really did it.

But Marty has ulterior motives, which is that having seen Catherine, he's attracted to her. And this is where the story really gets weird. Catherine was a singer until she married Kirk, and since Marty is a piano player and songwriter, the two team up in order to get Catherine into places like Marko's nightclub, since Marko was in Mavis' apartment after Marty was sent away by the doorman. So in theory Marko could be a suspect too.

Eddie Muller, in his Noir Alley presentation, mentioned that this was based on a story by Cornel Woolrich, which means that you shouldn't always expect the story to be that logical. Having recently watched another Noir Alley movie also based on a Woolrich story that will be the subject of a post in the relatively near future, I can certainly understand Muller's comments about Woolrich. As for who killed Mavis, I won't say, other then to point out that a killer was revealed, since the Production Code probably required that.

Dan Duryea was already known as a smooth villain in noirs; Black Angel was made after The Woman in the Window and Scarlett Street. Duryea is unsurprisingly good here; ditto Lorre although this is a relatively small role for Lorre despite his being so high up in the cast. Black Angel works in spite of the story and is definitely one worth watching.

Allen Smithee

I remember reading many years ago that if a director for some reason didn't want his name on a movie, directing credits would be given to a fictitious director called "Allen Smithee", or some similar spelling, since this was a name no actual director had. It turns out there really aren't all that many movies credited to Allen Smithee, so I was a bit surprised when I watched what was one of the earliest: the western Death of a Gunfighter.

Richard Widmark plays Frank Patch, marshal of Cottonwood, one of those small west Texas towns right on the railway line, circa 1900. The circa 1900 date means that times are beginning to change, as the old west is going and the settled townsfolk are getting more modern. Patch is a man out of his time, as the film opens more or less with him sleeping in one of the jail cells and adolescent Dan comes into check on the marshal.

Later that night, a drunk gets erratic enough that Frank shoots the drunk in self-defense, and that's enough for the town fathers to step up their campaign against Frank. The problem is that Frank had been given a more or less lifetime contract when the town was founded, because he was good at putting down the violence that was stereotypically rampant in Old West towns back in the day. Since the town fathers want to modernize, having a marshal like Frank just won't do. The simplest thing would be to persuade him to retire gracefully, but the editor of the town's newspaper, Oxley (Kent Smith), who would also like to see Frank leave, knows that Frank is never going to give up the job voluntarily.

One other person who doesn't have it in for Frank is Claire Quintana (Lena Horne), the proprietress of the town brothel from back in the days when such towns had brothels. It seems odd for the marshal to have a good relationship with a woman of ill repute, but he does, and it's to the point that he may just ask her to marry him, which seems really shocking for west Texas circa 1900 since it's the wrong kind of interracial marriage. (The movie was released in 1969, but which time the Production Code had been done away with and white/black "miscegenation" was no longer forbidden.)

The town fathers then go searching for Frank to try to convince him to retire, finding him fishing with young Dan. Frank refuses, and when Oxley is more insistent on it, Frank punches Oxley to the ground in full view of Oxley's son. Oxley eventually responds to this by... killing himself. And that really sets the town fathers into trying to provoke Frank into doing something that will let them kill him legally.

I knew about Allen (or Alan on later movies) Smithee being a pseudonym, but I didn't know the full story. In the case of Death of a Gunfighter, there were actually two directors. The first was a TV director whom Widmark didn't particularly like, so Widmark got the director off the job and replaced by better-known film director Don Siegel. Siegel didn't think it was fair to take credit for another man's work, and the DGA eventually reached the compromise that neither director really had directorial control, coming up with a pseudonym directors could use in future under exceptional circumstances.

As for the movie itself, it's not the world's worst movie by any means, although it's also not the greatest. For those who like the sort of western about the changing society, they'll probably enjoy Death of a Gunfighter; for regular people, it might be a bit slow and feeling like not a whole lot is happening.

Luis Buñuel does the Twilight Zone

Some months back, one of the TCM Imports movies was Luis Buñuel's movie The Exterminating Angel. Since the plot synopsis sounded interesting and didn't mention Buñuel by name, I decided to record it and have a go.

The movie opens up with an establishing shot of a Calle de la Providencia, presumably in Mexico City although I don't think any specific location is given, and one of the mansions on the street. As the movie opens, one of the servants is leaving the house, basically quitting his job, for unstated reasons. A couple of the other servants also feel ill at ease, although they don't quite know why.

The servants are supposed to be preparing dinner for their bosses and a bunch of well-to-do guests, but it's a shockingly late dinner, past 11:00 PM. (Granted, I work the early shift so I eat on Old People's Time, but 11:00 seems way too late for anybody, except possibly people who work a weird shift that doesnt let them eat a big main meal beforehand.) The guests have the sort of conversation you'd expect at such a dinner party, and retire to the salon where one of the guets plays baroque music on the piano.

After that, it's time to leave... except that for some reason, nobody does leave. Not only do they not go home, they all decide to sleep in the salon, no guest rooms for anybody. And when they wake up, everybody feels as though they can't leave for some reason nobody's able to state. They can't even go to the kitchen to get food and water, much less get out of the house. Obviously, if things go on like this, they'll starve to death.

Meanwhile, outside, the authorities realize something strange is going on after nobody leaves the house for a couple of days. Not only that, but they're not able to have contact with anybody inside the house. You'd think they could just walk in but, sort of like in Village of the Damned, there's a sort of invisible cordon that nobody is able to get past that prevents them from entering the house.

Conditions start to deteriorate inside the house what with the lack of food. (Never mind that nobody mentions the bathroom, unless there was one just off the salon that they were able to use.) They also have ever more absurd thoughts and hallucinations. Will anybody be able to get out alive? And just what is going on, really?

As The Exterminating Angel went on, I found myself liking it less and less. Then I had the inspiration of comparing it to an episode of The Twilight Zone, hoping that would get me to like the movie. But no luck. First, none of the characters here are particularly interesting and they don't have any sort of back story to flesh things out. That, and episodes of The Twilight Zone resolved themselves in a half hour minus commercials. The Exterminating Angel goes on for over 90. It doesn't work, as much as some peopel may want it to simply because of the stellar reputation Luis Buñuel has.

I suppose if you like arthouse stuff that the goodthinkful critics praise, then you'll like The Exterminating Angel. But it wasn't my thing at all.

The original platinum blonde

Actress Jean Harlow is fairly well-known as a platinum blonde bombshell. I blogged about her movie Bombshell back in 2014, but she also made a movie called Platinum Blonde, early in her career before she went over to MGM. Indeed, Harlow is only billed third here. TCM ran it a few months back, and not having seen it before, I decided to record it.

The actress getting top billing here is Loretta Young, even though hers isn't the biggest character in the story. Young plays Gallagher, a columnist at the Post, where she works with star reporter Stew Smith (tragic Robert Williams). Smith gets called into the editor's office to tell him to get a big story. The Schuylers are one of those wealthy families out on Long Island who don't want any sort of scandal. But they've got a son who's made a big mistake by getting involved with a chorus girl and writing a bunch of love letters to her. She's threatening to sue, and rumor has it Mrs. Schuyler's (Louise Closser Hale) lawyer has paid a substantial sum to get those letters back. Stew should go to the Schuyler mansion to find out whether the rumors are in fact true.

This is where we meet Jean Harlow. She plays Ann Schuyler, the kid sister to Michael, the brother with the dalliances, although he's a rather minor character in this whole thing. Ann is completely innocent in this whole scandal, and it certainly wouldn't do to harm her by printing the story. A reporter from a rival paper shows up at the same time as Smith, and the lawyer bribes both of them not to print the story. Or attempts to; the rival reporter takes the bribe but not Smith. This is where Ann implores him not to hurt her by printing the story. However, he does so anyway.

The next day, at a speakeasy, we see Stew bragging to Gallagher about how he got the story, and about how he's going to go back to the Schuyler mansion to see Ann because he's fallen in love with her. He has an excuse to go back, having taken a book from the Schuyler library, but unsurprisingly Ann would rather not have anything to do with Stew. We also see here that Gallagher has the hots for Stew, but has never been able to tell him.

Stew has another reason for wanting to see the Schuylers. He was able to obtain the letters the chorus girls had, and is willing to sell them back to the Schuylers. That gets Ann to perk up her ears. When she fixes lunch for him, the two start to develop feelings for each other despite the previous rancor between them.

Logically, however, we know that Stew and Ann aren't really right for each other. Either that, or Ann isn't really right for her social class. But we've got a fairly long way to go before finding out which resolution we're going to get.

Platinum Blonde is an interesting if imperfect movie. A lot of people have suggested that Young and Harlow are miscast here and should have been given each other's roles. In many ways that makes some sense, but I don't know if the filmgoing public or the studios had realized yet just what they had in Harlow. Put her in a wisecracking journalist (think Torchy Blane) role here, and she'd be great. Young is made to be too muted and wasn't suited to the brassy nature that works best here. Likewise, Harlow isn't really the stodgy heiress, something Young could have done in her sleep.

As for Williams, he does very well as the star of the proceedings. Sadly, he suffered a ruptured appendix a few days after the movie's release and that killed him. Who knows what he would have been able to bring to the screen had he survived. Direction is by Frank Capra (including middle initial, apparently not famous enough to be the one and only Frank Capra), and the movie certainly has his touches evident.

Despite some flaws, Platinum Blonde is a lot of fun and one not to be missed.

Irma the Sweet

TCM ran a night of Shirley MacLaine's films not too long ago. One of the films they ran then but that I hadn't posted on before is coming up again: Irma La Douce, tomorrow (June 10) at noon.

A narrator (apparently an uncredited Louis Jourdan) tells us about a particular working-class section of Paris that's up all night as opposed to some of the more well-to-do parts; the reason it never sleeps is because, well, the women there sleep for money. (OK. Sorry for the terrible pun.) Intersperesed throughout the opening credits is one such prostitute, Irma (Shirley MacLaine), whom we see giving different clients different reasons on why she became a prostitute.

The prostitutes are able to ply their trade mostly because the cop that patrols the beat looks the other way. Well, at least he looks the other way for a price, being on the take. He goes to the café run by Moustache (Lou Jacobi), where a lot of the prostitutes and their pimps, including Irma's pimp Hippolyte, gather; it's there that the cop gets his bribes paid. At least, until the police commanders go through the regular schedule of assigning rookie cops to their beats.

Nestor (Jack Lemmon) has been assigned to this particular part of Paris, and he's a decidedly honest cop. But one who's also a bit of a naïf, as he seems to believe Irma's excuses when he asks her about what she does. When he figures out what the women do, he has a whole bunch of them arrested and taken down to the station. Things don't go quite the way Nestor expects, however, as somebody higher up apparently wants to use the prostitutes as a safety valve. Nestor gets framed for bribery and summarily fired.

And yet, Nestor decides he's going to return to the neighborhood where everything went wrong. Then, in a wacky twist, he becomes friens with Irma, and tries to "save" her from her pimp. He does, but at a price of becoming a kept man. He moves in with Irma, but she insists that it's unbecoming for a prostitute not to be able to support herself, or even the man she's with. She very much believes that Nestor shouldn't have a job.

So Nestor comes up with a bizarre scheme of his own. He'll take an overnight job at the butcher's market, while also coming up with an alter ego, the British "Lord X". As Lord X, he'll become the sole client of Irma, with the money he makes at the meat market going to pay for Lord X's dalliances with Irma. Of course, Hippolyte is still in the background, and Irma wonders why Nestor is always so tired. And Nestor has not yet thought of a way to end this scheme. The way he picks, however, doesn't quite work....

It's a wonder how director Billy Wilder was able to get Irma La Douce made, since the Production Code was still in effect, even though it was beginning to weaken. It's based on a French stage musical, and you can see why Wilder would have liked the material, although the songs were more or less excised from the movie. (My understanding is that composer André Previn's musical themes here are based on the songs from the musical, but there's no singing of note.)

However, Irma La Douce is a bit of a one-joke movie, and unlike Some Like It Hot where the joke is only stretched to two hours, and the joke doesn't really begin until a good 20-30 minutes in, Irma La Douce runs over 140 minutes and the joke gets staler much more quickly. It also doesn't help that both Lemmon and MacLaine seem a bit miscast here. They both try hard and are definitely professional, but I'm sorry to say that Irma La Douce is not one of Billy Wilder's greatest movies.

Touched by a Mink

Many years back, well before I started the blog, I saw the Cary Grant/Doris Day romantic comedy That Touch of Mink. I never got to blog about it, so when Cary Grant was TCM's Star of the Month and they got the rights to show it, I recorded it in order that I could finally watch it again to do a blog post on it.

Under the opening credits, we get to meet both Grant and Day's characters. Grant is Philip Shayne, an executive who rides through Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine. Day plays Cathy Timberlake, an unemployed computer operator in the days when computers meant punch-card programming and a device that took up a whole room. As she's on her way to the unemployment office, Philip's limousine accidentally drives through a puddle, splasing it all over Cathy and ruining her outfit. He wants to make it up to her, so sends his executive assistant Roger (Gig Young) out to try to find her.

Cathy, meanwhile, is facing trouble at the unemployment office, as the man in charge of her case, Beasley (John Astin) keeps putting the moves on her, which is thoroughly unprofessional and should have gotten him fired even in those days, let alone today. She lives with her best friend Connie (Audrey Meadows), who works at the Automat across the street from Shayne's office. So it's only natural that Shayne is going to see Cathy on the street and get Roger to talk to her.

Both of them would like to show Philip what-for, so Roger brings Cathy up to the office. However, Cathy is so totally taken by Philip that it's love at first sight for her. And it's similarly love at first sight for Philip. And since he's fabulously wealthy, he's able to take Cathy all over the place and do things that no mere mortal could do, like get Cathy into the dugout at a Yankees baseball game, which is an excuse for cameos for a couple of the Yankees' stars of the day.

But it's fairly quickly that Cathy realizes the relationship is getting serious, which means the possibility of sex -- and sex outside of marriage is a somewhat controversial thing for the early 1960s. Cathy is beginning to think she'd rather be married. At the same time, Cathy and Philip's friends are having misunderstandings of their own, with Connie still wondering whether Philip is taking advantage of her, while Roger seeing an analyst who completely gets the situation wrong.

Cathy finally comes to the conclusion that she's going to have to force the issue. She goes back to Beasley, and gets him to take her out in such a way that Philip will absolutely find out and do whatever it takes to win her back, leading to a climax that is madcap and more reminiscent of the old screwball comedies, with an ending that satisfies the Production Code.

That Touch of Mink is a physically pretty movie to watch, with lovely color showing off early 1960s design as it actually was (more or less), and not the idealized view people today have of the Kennedy era. As for the story, it feels really dated, and I hate to say that both Cary Grant and Doris Day are much too old for their roles. They do the best they can, and they're both still appealing as actors, but at times I can't help but want to reach through the screen and smack the writers.

But the appeal of Grant and Day makes That Touch of Mink a passable enough movie with flaws that some people are going to find easier to overlook than I did.