Bachelor Flat

So, over the weekend I watched Bachelor Flat, having taped it off of FXM. It's on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme should you want to watch it too.

Terry-Thomas plays Prof. Patterson, an paleontology professor at a college in California. All the co-eds love him simply because he's British, and they're disappointed to find out that he's getting married to fashion designer Helen Bushmill (Celeste Holm). As for Patterson, he's currently renting his fiancée's beach house while she's away in Paris. Patterson has also let a law student, Mike Pulaski (Richard Beymer), live in a trailer on the property.

Trouble comes for the good professor when a young woman, Libby (Tuesday Weld) shows up at the house. She acts as if she knows the place, and she's obviously looking for Helen. So when she discovers there's a strange man in the house, she has no idea what's going on. Now, if both of them could just have told the truth, things would have been so much easier. But no.

It turns out that Libby is actually Helen's daughter, and that Helen never bothered to tell her fiancé that she was previously married and has a teenaged daughter. Helen also never bothered to tell her daughter that Mom was going to get remarried. Now, at least Libby has one slight reason to lie, which is that she's run away from boarding school. But still.... Meanwhile, Mike has been using the good professor as a way to attract girlfriends. Apparently, they'd all rather be around the professor than around Mike, so while Libby is there, another woman, Gladys (Francesca Bellini) shows up.

It goes on like this, with nobody being honest to each other, until Helen returns home from Paris. There's also a subplot about the professor's dinosaur bone, which Mike's dachshund wants, and a possible grant to go digging for bones, which the professor hopes to do on his honeymoon.

Frankly, I didn't care much for Bachelor Flat at all. It had the feel of one of those terrible "generation gap" movies, with Terry-Thomas and Holm trying to act hip around the young ones, with everybody lying their way through everything. I've mentioned on several occasions how I dislike what I refer to as the "comedy of lies", where characters tell one lie and them compound the problem by telling bigger and bigger lies. It rarely works, and then combine it with the older stars (especially Holm) being way out of their element. Beymer also has no charisma.

Some of you may like it, as there's some nice early 60s set design, and this genre may actually appeal to some people. It just doesn't appeal to me, but judge for yourself.