For some values of sweet

I didn't intend to do posts on two of what I refer to as the 1960s "generation gap" movies in fairly close succession, after last week's post on Don't Make Waves. I also didn't intend to do posts on two Debbie Reynolds movies a few weeks apart, after I Love Melvin. But it turns out there's a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM tomorrow, April 7, that relates to both of those films. That movie is How Sweet It Is! at 8:00 AM as part of a birthdy salute to actor James Garner.

After wannabe groovy opening titles and one of those awful 1960s MOR songs, the action shifts to a bedroom in an upper-middle-class suburban house in New Rochelle, NY, where a man and a woman are in bed together making mad passionate love -- or least as mad and passionate as you could get on screen in 1968 -- in the middle of the day. The woman, Jenny Henderson (Debbie Reynolds), is worried about Davey (Donald Losby) returning home from work and catching the two in bed together. Davey does show up, but in a twist it turns out that Davey is Jenny's teenaged son, and the man in bed is Grif Henderson (James Garner), who is Jenny's wife and Davey's father.

Grif is a photojournalist, and the magazine he works for sends him on foreign assignments often enough that he doesn't get to see Jenny so often. Worse is that he doesn't get to see Davey, which worries Mom since she knows Davey needs a father figure. So when Grif goes to have a father/son chat, he learns that Davey is dating Bootsie (Hilary Thompson), the daughter of Grif's boss at the magazine. Bootsie is going to be spending the summer on one of those guided student tours of Europe, and Davey wants to use the money from his job to go over to Europe and follow Bootsie around. Dad kind of likes the idea -- it's a good way to learn about girls -- but Mom isn't so certain.

So what Jenny's Mom does is get Bootsie's mom to put pressure on Bootsie's dad. He, as the editor of the magazine, is planning to send a photographer along to document the trip for the magazine -- American student life on the European grand tour or some such. Perhaps it can be arranged so that Grif is the photographer, and Davey his assistant, so Dad can watch to see that Davey doesn't get into too much hijinks. Jenny, for her part, will rent a house on the Riviera for the family to stay in after the tour.

Except that Jenny is a bit naïve and gets taken in by an obvious con artist (Terry-Thomas in a brief role) and the transatlantic voyage offers no prospects of rekindling the romance. When everybody gets to France, Jenny goes south to the house they've rented for the summer, only to find out that the owner, Philippe Maspere (Maurice Ronet), a prominent lawyer, is living there as his summer house. But since there's no place else for Jenny to go and he's obviously attracted to her, he lets her rent the place for the second half of what she was going to pay the agent.

The standard love triangle hijinks ensue, with Philippe kinda-sorta pursuing Jenny, who for her part seems flattered although she really does love Grif. Grif, meanwhile, is being pursued by the guide Nancy, who is thrilled to have an adult male with her after having to spend so much time with teenagers. One coincidence leads to another, and the movie climaxes with Grif and Jenny getting arrested; Jenny getting bailed out by a bordello owner (she's in a holding pen with the owner's stable of prostitutes); and Grif and Davey showing up at the bordello.

From what I've read, James Garner hated How Sweet It Is!, although he enjoyed the people he worked with on the movie. I can't say I disagree with him. The premise, beyond a middle-aged couple still having a sex drive but mostly unable by circumstance to act upon it, is forced, and the budget doesn't even allow for the sort of establishing shots or location shooting other "Hollywood goes to Europe" movies of the era had. Worse, a lot of the movie feels like it's trying to appeal to a younger crowd but failing badly. The movie also has any number of plot holes. The ocean voyage wouldn't give a husband and wife a cabin together? The teenagers' given ages are also much too young.

If you want to watch another example of Hollywood's difficulty in adjusting to changing social values in the 1960s, How Sweet It Is! fits the bill. But it's not a particuarly good movie.

TCM Star of the Month Apirl 2026: Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren in Two Women (Apr. 6, 9:15 PM)

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month and past the Easter holiday, it's time for some of the traditional programming features to show up again on TCM. Most notably, this means the Star of the Month goes from three nights of George Brent to four nights of Sophia Loren, whose movies will be appearing every Monday night in April in prime time. The salute actually kicks of at 8:00 PM tonight not with a movie, but with an interview she did at the TCM Film Festival a decade or so ago. Tonight includes her Oscar-winning performance in Two Women at 9:15 PM, followed at 11:00 PM by Legend of the Lost, a title that I saw showing up in the on-demand section of one or another of the free streaming services only to discover that it was an aggregator for the paid portion. So I'm recording that one tonight.

Sophia Loren and David Niven in Lady L (Apr. 14, 2:15 AM)

The second week of the salute brings another of Loren's movies that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Lady L, which is a bit of a surprise since I think this is one released in the US by MGM. I'm pretty certain I've seen the trailer show up enough. Anyhow, time to get this one on and then off the ever-growing watch list.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day (Apr. 21, 3:30 AM)

The last two Monday nights bring a rather more eclectic line-up of movies, including Man of La Mancha (another one I haven't seen) on April 27, but I'd like to mention the fine performances of A Special Day in the wee hours of April 21, since it's mostly a two-character play with fine performances from Loren and frequent Italian co-star Marcello Mastroianni. Surprisingly, I don't see Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow on the TCM schedule this month.

Warner Bros. B Urban Corruption Drama #23489567826

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies, and this is often the case even when the plots turn out to be implausible. Another good example of this is Strange Alibi. I presume it turns up often enough on TCM, but I don't think I had noticed it until the last time it showed up several months back.

The backdrop is one that's not uncommon for B movies in the pre-World War II era: a big city where there's a crime syndicate, and they've been able to infiltrate various parts of the administration, leaving them free to act with impunity. When somebody does threaten to turn state's witness, that person is immediately shot. The police are quick to find the killer but wouldn't you know it the killer "commits suicide" by hanging.

The police chief, Sprague (Jonathan Hale), brings in a bunch of his detectives to have a long talk about the matter. The chief immediately gets into it with one of the men, Sgt. Joe Geary (a very young Arthur Kennedy), who proceeds to deal with his temporary suspension by getting into a fight with the police chief, which makes the suspension permanent. Wait until Joe's poor fiancée Alice (Joan Perry) finds out.

Except that all of this was a ruse. Sprague knows the syndicate has dirty cops working for it, although he can't figure out who. He wants Geary to figure that out, except that having Geary do it in uniform is going to present a problem for various reasons, hence the nonsense about getting Geary fired. This mission is so super-secret that only Geary and Sprague know about it. Sprague hasn't even bothered to tell anybody like the state Attorney General or governor or anyone in the feds.

So you can probably guess what happens next. Geary goes to an establishment known to be a hangout for syndicate types, run by Katie (Florence Bates), who isn't exactly law-abiding but also has a heart of gold which is going to come into play for the climax. Joe works from there, getting into the good graces of the syndicate by shooting some high-priced liquor bottles from a bar owner who's shorting the syndicate. Geary finds a guy named McKaye who can provide key evidence, only to discover too late that they're being watched. When Geary takes McKaye to Sprague's house (really, they're meeting there despite the code to communicate?), the bad guys follow along and kill Sprague in a way that clearly implicates Geary and only Geary, getting him sent up the river as it were to a nasty prison. The only way Joe is going to be able to clear his name is to find McKaye. After all, nobody else knows that Geary was working with Sprague to weed out corruption.

Geary is eventually able to escape, but has very few places to go. Worse, McKaye is found, but he's found rather dead. Still, Geary has some luck in that the governor is working on weeding out corruption and might just be able to help Geary out....

The whole plot of Strange Alibi feels like a mish-mash of tropes that had all been done before. But this being Warner Bros., they do it well even if the plot as a whole bears little resemblance to reality. They're also helped out by a fine stable of mostly supporting character-type actors. Arthur Kennedy, of course, would go on to much bigger things (and five Oscar nominations), but at this point nobody knew what they had in him. And Strange Alibi is also, like all of the good Warner B movies, breezily fast, clocking in at a sprightly 63 minutes. Definitely another one worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

A family friendly movie for Easter

Another of the movies that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM soon is the animated Watership Down. You can see it tomorrow, April 5, at 8:00 AM.

The movie opens with an origin story, about how the Sun god, named Frith and voiced by Michael Hordern, created all the animals and plants and how the animals lived harmoniously as herbivores and mostly alike. The rabbits, however do what rabbits do and multiply, eating too much of the grass. This causes Frith to turn a bunch of animals into carnivores who will be more than happy to eat rabbits, although rabbits do get the gifts of speed and cleverness.

Cut to the present day, in a bucolic part of Britain. Fiver (Richard Briers) is a rabbit living in a warren run by a chief (Ralph Richardson) and his deputy Capt. Holly (John Bennett), where everybody lives happil, eating, sleeping, and creating new little bunnies. Except one day Fiver, who is a bit timid by nature, has a vision in which the field suddenly becomes covered with blood. (It's later explained that developers turn the field into a new housing estate, severely disrupting the warren.) Fiver and his brother Hazel (John Hurt) go to the chief with the suggestion that the rabbits are going to need to move somewhere safer, although understandably a lot of the rabbits aren't so certain they agree, thus splitting the warren in two.

Fiver, Hazel, and a handful of other rabbits leave even though the chief and Capt. Holly try to stop them. The smaller group are successful in getting away, although trying to find a new place to start a new warren that's safe isn't going to be easy, since these rabbits have no idea where they're going and little idea of the big bad world that's out there. They have various misadventures in the forest and at a farm where a man breeds rabbits for food, before coming to the conclusion that they have to go someplace like the top of a hill that has a commanding view of the surrounding area in order to be safe.

They get there and live happily ever after, with one small problem. They don't have any doe rabbits. How are they going to procreate and make the new rabbits necessary to keep the warren going? Fortunately, they also save a seagull named Kehaar (Zero Mostel) who has lost his way and is somewhat injured. Kehaar offers to fly around looking for doe rabbits. They eventually learn of another warren called Efrara where the leader, General Woundwort (Harry Andrews) is such a nasty dictator with underlings who keep the regular rabbits in a state of terror that some of them would like to leave if only they could get the courage to do so. Hazel infiltrates the warren, becoming one of Woundwort's camp commandants if you will, in a move that seems like it would have been a strategic blunder. Of course Hazel leads a break to safety, and Woundwort is pissed, going after the escapees.

Watership Down is a surprisingly dark movie for something that sounds on the surface like it's going to have the trappings of a children's book. And since animation is -- and was even more so in the 1970s -- thought of as a medium for children's stories, Watership Down's open look at the violence of death is not what you might expect. Then again, Bambi many years earlier also did so. Unsurprisingly, since Disney was really the only quality animation studio in the 1970s -- compare them to the animation of a movie like Treasure Island that I reviewed not too long ago -- it stands to reason that people are going to compare Watership Down to Disney. It's a comparison that doesn't always come off well, particularly in the case of Kehaar the gull who to me is a rather obnoxious character.

The animation is better than what Hanna-Barbera or Filmways were doing on TV, but not as good as the Disney classics. The story is good, although from what I've read one might get more out of the movie if one is already more familiar with the book, which I never read. A plus however is that this, being a British production, is also rather different from what one would expect from a Hollywood movie. Definitely, Watership Down is one that's worth watching, warts and all.

Certainly not the middle

A movie that I wasn't certain whether or not I'd seen before showed up on TCM some time back, so I recorded it: The Beginning or the End. Eventually I got around to watching it, and as far as I could tell I hadn't seen it before. A search of the blog claims that I certainly hadn't blogged about it anyway, so now that it's coming up again on TCM. it's time to rectify that oversight with this post. That airing is early tomorrow, April 4, at 4:00 AM.

The movie starts off with one of the more unique framing scenes I can think of. A time capsule is being prepared, only to be opened in the year 2446 which would from the point of the movie be 500 years in the future. A spokesman on the film in the time capsule talks about the development of the atomic bomb, and that the movie the people of 2446 would be about to watch is the documentation of that effort, how it ended that war in the distant past, and the hope that the atom could be used for peaceful purposes....

Back in the late 1930s, Matt Cochran (Tom Drake playing one of the fictional characters in the movie) is a graduate student who with some professors is working on the idea of nuclear fission. This of course results in energy being released, along with the realization that the energy could be used to make a bomb. Several of the professors of the day, like Robert Oppenheimer (Hume Cronyn) and Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia) feel that President Roosevelt should be informed of this. After all, war was coming to Europe, and it was pretty obvious that if scientists in America could figure all this out, certainly scientists in Nazi Germany would figure it out too.

Research continues on a small scale until December 1941, which is of course when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the Americans into the war. President Roosevelt authorizes a covert spending of some billions of dollars for Oppenheim and the other scientists to figure out a way to weaponize the splitting of the atom, which of course has to be a controlled reaction since, if it can't be stopped during development, it's the places where the research is being done that will get blown up.

The military point man for all this is Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy), with his second in command being Lt. Col. Jeff Nixon (Robert Walker; and again as far as I'm aware another of the fictional characters). Sites are set up in Illinois where Fermi was based; in Oak Ridge, TN; and in out-of-the way Alamagordo, NM. With a war being on, Americans are portrayed as happy to move out to help the government's war effort, although they have no knowledge of what the government is trying to do.

Now, since this is all based on history, we know that that first controlled nuclear bomb is detonated at Trinity in July, 1945. Harry Truman is at the Potsdam Conference, and it's his job to make the decision to actually use the bomb against Japan in Hiroshima and then Nagaski. Cochran is one of the civilians sent out to make certain the US bombers who have been running the mission will know how to deal with this special new kind of bomb.

The Beginning or the End is of course based on real historical events. However, liberties had to be taken with the story for a bunch of reasons. One is of course security; the movie was made only about a year after the end of World War II, and there was still a large amount that was classified and couldn't be revealed. There's also the fact that apparently, real people still alive had veto power over their portrayal in movies at the time. Several of the real scientists, notably Niels Bohr, didn't want to be used, necessitating more changes. The biggest reason, however, was the dramatic one for the perceived benefit of the audience. That's why the love story between Cochran and his wife (Beverly Tyler), as well as a secondary romance between Nixon and his girlfriend (Audrey Totter), are shoehorned into the movie.

It's these sops to the moviegoing public that make the movie one that's not so well remembered today, due to their lessening the dramatic power of the movie. It was only a few years later that Above and Beyond about the Enola Gay was released, with more realistic stuff coming out as the Cold War was winding down and culminating with the movie Oppenheimer a few years back. The Beginning or the End is competently enough made, but it does have the marks of MGM and the Hollywood studio system all over it, both for good and bad.

Strange Western on TCM

TCM's lineup tomorrow (Apr. 3) morning and afternoon is a bunch of mid-1950s widescreen stuff that I think is all from Warner Bros. One of the movies is one that I hadn't blogged about before and was on my DVR from the last time TCM ran it. That movie is Strange Lady in Town, airing at 4:00 PM, so as is my way around here I watched the movie in order to be able to put up this post for the upcoming showing.

After the credits, a title card informs us that the scene is the New Mexico territory in 1880, not far from Santa Fe. A wagon is going over the landscape, only to crash, fortunately near a bunch of ranchers. The lady passenger on the wagon is Julia Garth (Greer Garson) from Boston. She's a doctor in an era when lady doctors were uncommon, and out west even less common. But one of the ranchers has some pains so she treats the guy much to their surprise.

The military adjutant coming to pick her up arrives, but the two get waylaid on the way to what's going to be Julia's new house. Several bandit types ask about the military court of inquiry being held, although the adjutant knows knowing, not having been there. The adjutant in question, Martinez-Martinez, is working for Lt. David Garth (Cameron Mitchell), who happens to be Julia's brother, and one of the reasons Julia is coming out to New Mexico. His is also one of the two main plot strands going through the movie.

The other plot strand includes the doctor currently in town, Dr. O'Brien (Dana Andrews). He's got an adolescent niece Spurs (Lois Smith) who is quite the tomboy, and who has a thing for Lt. Garth even though he isn't right for Spurs. Getting back to Dr. O'Brien, he's one of those old-fashioned people who thinks it's not proper for ladies to be doctors, which is going to be an even bigger problem considering that she knows the latest advances in medicine from back east which are going to show her to be right in a bunch of situations Dr. O'Brien wrong. But at some point along the way Dr. O'Brien is going to fall in love with Julia.

As for Lt. Garth, I mentioned that he's not quite right for Spurs, even though she doesn't get that yet. He likes to gamble and is quick-tempered, which are traits liable to get an officer in trouble. There's also that court of inquiry mentioned in the opening. Lt. Garth tells his sister that the court of inquiry is being held because somebody sold the army a bunch of cattle that turned out not to have been owned by the person doing the selling, which equates to cattle rustling and a serious crime. As you can guess, especially considering a comment when Julia mentions not being able to buy a place for her on an officer's salary, Lt. Garth might know more about the rustling than he's letting on.

Finally, for a movie set in 1880 New Mexico, the studio had to insert a couple of historial tropes: Dr. Garth meets Billy the Kid (Nick Adams) when he and another man come in because of a toothache. Later in the movie, Garth treats Civil War general, and by this time territorial governor, Lew Wallace.

Strange Lady in Town combines a lot of different plot stuff into what is in many ways a pastiche of the Old West. It's a movie that's definitely competently made, although it's also one that's rather old-fashioned, in a way that reminds me of another Garson movie Blossoms in the Dust. It's certainly not the first film I'd think to recommend regarding any of the people in the movie, but it's also one that there's not anything particularly wrong with. It just doesn't do anything new. In the days before TV, this would have been enough, but having been made later, it's easy to see why this one has become little remembered.

Teacher's Pet

Every now and then, it surprises me to come across a studio-era film with big stars that I haven't seen before. Then again, TCM doesn't have the rights to films from studios like Universal and Paramount, so some of the stuff that's A-level but not famous doesn't show up on TCM all that often. A good example of this is Teacher's Pet, a late-1950s Paramount movie with two big names leading the cast: Clark Gable and Doris Day. So I recorded it the last time TCM ran it.

Clark Gable plays James Gannon, who works at the sort of big-city newspaper that was a staple of 1930s movies, with a hard-boiled editor trying to break news, especially on things like lurid murders, and up-and-coming reporters going out there to get the stories. One would-be reporter at the paper, who is only a copy boy since he can't get a real reporter's job, is Barney Kovac (Nick Adams), whose mom would rather he go to college.

You'll note that this is an era when reporters didn't necessarily have to go to J-school, although there were already college courses for journalism. One person teaching night classes at such a school is Erica Stone (Doris Day), whose father ages ago wrote for a small-town paper. As a result of her father's experiences, Erica has decided views on what journalism should be like, which isn't quite like what Gannon does. Erica has written to Gannon to give a guest lecture about city journalism, but Gannon turns it down because he really has a thing about journalism school as well as thoughts about lady reporters.

Still, Jim's boss insists he go to the class, so Jim goes undercover, pretending to be a salesman with the name Jim Gallagher. Surprisingly, Erica doesn't recognize him. If she did, we wouldn't have a rest of the movie. But Erica is so insulting to Gannon that he decides he's going to audit the class after all, if only to be able to show Erica just how wrong she is about what real reporting is like. Unsurprisingly, since Jim is a real reporter, he's able to handle the first assignment that Erica gives the students and come up with a much better story than any other student possibly could.

This leads to Erica, still not recognizing Jim for who he really is, offering to tutor him privately outside of class hours, since he can "learn" more that way than in class. The next unsurprising thing is that Jim falls in love with Erica. This is a bit of a problem considering that Erica already has a boyfriend in Dr. Hugo Pine (Gig Young), an intellectual who is superior to Jim at all the things that you'd stereotypically expect a female college professor to want in a man. Since Clark Gable is top-billed, however, you know things are going to work out such that it's Jim who winds up with Erica at the end of the movie, despite his dishonesty about his true identity.

Teacher's Pet is one of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground, but what makes it worth watching is the acting ability of the two leads, who take to the material well and make a surprisingly appealing couple despite their age difference. They fit their parts like wearing a comfortable pair of shoes, making for an enjoyable watch despite there being nothing new here. They're also helped by a pretty good screenplay and good supporting performances. If you can find Teacher's Pet, watch it and be entertained for two hours.

Pay no attention to that map

One of the Noir Alley entries that Eddie Muller presented quite some time ago that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from the DVR, and then saved until much later to put up this post, is the 1947 film Riffraff. (Note that there are multiple films with this title, and the posters for the movie but not the title cards have the hyphenated title "Riff-Raff".)

The movie starts off with an interesting introductory sequence that doesn't have any of the main characters. A plane is flying somewhere over Latin America, except that it's a cargo plane carrying a couple of passengers of the sort who in another movie would be on one of those shady tramp steamers. The cargo door opens, and one of the passengers jumps out with a briefcase; the other passenger is no longer on the plane. The jumper winds up in Panama very close to the Canal Zone, since there are a whole lot of Americans soon to be around.

The man who jumped out of the plane is mysterious Charles Hasso (Marc Krah), and he goes to the office of fixer/factotum/sometimes detective Dan Hammer (Pat O'Brien), a man who knows the local area and knows how to get things done. Hasso's request is for Hammer to basically escort him around for two days and make certain nothing untoward happens to him. Meanwhile, he takes a map out of the briefcase and pins it to the room divider while Dan is on the other side of it changing into a fresh set of clothes!

Also getting in touch with Hammer is Gredson (Jerome Cowan), who works for an oil company based in Panama. Gredson was expecting the other man on that cargo plane to come to him with that map that Hasso pinned up in Hammer's office, as that map supposedly has the locations of some new oil discoveries in Peru to which nobody really has the concessions or something. And Gredson is willing to pay big bucks for that map.

Amazingly, nobody seems able to find that map despite it being in plain sight in Hammer's office! Among the people who have an interest in that map is Maxine (Anne Jeffreys), a nightclub singer who feigns romantic interest in Hammer while also trying to play the other side by working with Gredson. And then there's Molinar (Walter Slezak), who claims to be an artist but, because he's played by Walter Slezak, is obviously somebody with ulterior motives of his own and not exactly a protagonist. Worse, Hammer's office gets ransacked in a search for the map -- and nobody finds it!

For me, that's the big problem with Riffraff, unless you consider that the map is just another macguffin with the interactions between the characters being the main thing here. In my case, I just found it way too hard to believe that everybody could be this stupid that they couldn't find that map. There's also the addition of Percy Kilbride playing Hammer's assistant/driver. I think he's supposed to be a bit of comic relief, but his is the sort of character who isn't going to be to everybody's taste.

Still, Riffraff is a visually stylish movie at times, which shouldn't be a surprise since director Ted Tetzlaff had started as a cinematographer. It's just that that visual style is most evident in the opening and the story rather fizzles out.

Staying hip with Tony Curtis

There's a cycle of films from Hollywood in the 1960s that I like to call for lack of a better term "generation gap movies" because they have the feel of old Hollywood trying to keep up with the times and not being particularly good at so doing. Another example of this is one that was on my DVR: Don't Make Waves, early tomorrow (March 31) morning at 4:15 AM as part of a night of movies saluting actress Claudia Cardinale, who died in September 2025.

Cardinale is the nominal female lead here, but this is Tony Curtis' movie all the way. He plays Carlo Cofield, a New Yorker who's vacationing in California when his car gets hit by Laura Califatti (that's Claudia Cardinale, as if you couldn't tell from the Italian accent). Laura decides to make it up to Carlo by putting him up at her house for the night; the question of what's going to happen to his car seems to be one of many plot holes not answered in the movie. More importantly, however, is the fact that this isn't quite Laura's house; instead, it's being funded by swimming pool manufacturer Rod Prescott (Robert Webber). Laura is Rod's mistress; he claims that his wife is an invalid which is why he can't get a divorce. In any case, Rod isn't happy to see Carlo.

Carlo gets an idea when he meets Rod, which is to stay out west and get a job selling pools for Rod's company, having learned that the company is trying to use Jim Backus (in a cameo role) for publicity. Before getting to see Rod again, however, Carlo is on the beach, which is one of those muscle beach types where bodybuilder Harry (David Draper) lives with his girlfriend, skydiver Malibu (Sharon Tate). Carlo falls for Malibu, which is a problem considering she's in a relationship with a big guy. There's also the issue of Laura falling for Carlo.

Further complicating matters is that when Carlo goes to see Rod, who should show up at Rod's office but... Diane Prescott (Joanna Barnes)? She's Rod's wife, and decidedly not an invalid. She also knows quite a bit about what's going on with Rod and Laura. Carlo, being a good publicity guy, is able to leverage all of this into a job for the swimming pool company. And then, to try to keep Malibu, he comes up with a way to have her sky dive into one of the company's swimming pools, although that stunt doesn't quite go off without a hitch. He also goes to see an astrologer whose column Harry reads, "Madame" Lavinia (Edgar Bergen; yes, his character is using a pseudonym), to drive a wedge between Harry and Malibu.

Eventually, everything winds up for the finale when all of the main characters meet at Carlo's beach house. They are, however, threatened with disaster when the monsoon season hits and the rainstorm begins to chip away at the land under Carlo's house....

Apparently Don't Make Waves is based on a book that was published in the late 1950s. Had the movie been made when the book came out, it might have felt fresh. By 1967, however, it feels tired and not particularly funny. The humor feels forced, and Carlo is such a dishonest schemer in the Jack Carson mode that his character isn't particularly likeable. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Your wacky family turns me on

A sub-genre, or maybe a plot trope, of a surprising number of movies is one where a person, usually a rich and hitherto proper man, falls in love with a woman who is either "free-spirited" or else has an entire family of unorthodox relatives. A minor entry into that field is the Lucille Ball comedy A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob.

Now, as you might imagine, Lucille Ball is The Girl, although considering how she'd later be known for her zaniness she's actually the one normal member of her family. She plays Dot Duncan, a working girl who does want to be more cultured. To that end, Dot's shiftless brother Pigeon (Lloyd Corrigan) found some opera tickets, for an entire box no less. Of course, the box has been taken out on subscription by the Herrick family, including Stephen (a young Edmond O'Brien) and his fiancée Cecilia (Marguerite Chapman), who if anything might be even more strait-laced than Stephen.

Dot gets the impression Pigeon came across the tickets by less than honest means, so she goes to Herrick's business, the shipping firm he runs together with Abel Martin (Henry Travers) to sort of apologize, and winds up getting herself hired as a secretary in the process. Of course with a young woman like this there's always the question of how long she'll be keeping the job since women generally quit to become housewives when they got married. And, as for Dot, she's got a fiancé of her own, of sorts, in the form of "Coffee Cup" (George Murphy). Coffee Cup is a would be professional wrestler, but that doesn't pay the bills in general, and certainly not enough to get married to Dot. So he did a hitch with the Navy that he's about to finish up.

Now, Coffee Cup is looking for ways to get that money to marry Dot, and Stephen isn't really doing anything to stop this since he wants Dot to be happy and has a fiancée of his own. But you know that the two are going to wind up together in the final reel. Things start going bad when Coffee Cup and Pigeon kinda-sorta cause a right in which Stephen gets knocked unconscious, so they take Stephen to the Duncan home to recover for the night. That's bad enough for Stephen, since it means he's neglecting Cecilia. And then there's the way Pigeon keeps blowing the money that Coffee Cup would use to try to get married to Dot.

More complications arise when Abel is the one person who thinks that Stephen and Dot would probably be more right for each other, so tries to push Stephen to pursue Dot even though both of them are already in relationships with other people. But again, this is the sort of movie where you known who's going to wind up with whom in the end.

I've mentioned several times how, when Lucille Ball was TCM's Star of the Month ages ago, Carol Burnett did a piece for the spotlight talking about her great friend. One of the things Burnett mentioned is how the studios, especially RKO to whom Ball was under contract, didn't quite know how to use her. This sort of comedy should have been more up Ball's alley, but then she's not really the one being asked to be zany. Also, some of the characters, especially Pigeon, are so unlikable that you just want Dot and Stephen to abandon their respective families.

But maybe you'll like A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob more than I did. Apparently the critics seemed to like it.