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.