A Ticklish Affair

Another of those movies that I had seen show up on TCM several times in the past, but had never actually watched beyond a few small snippets, was the family romantic comedy A Ticklish Affair. So with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it, and only recently finally got around to watching that recording. It's showing up on TCM tomorrow, August 25, at 8:00 AM as part of a Summer Under the Stars day of movies dedicated to Shirley Jones, so with that in mind I've schedule the post for today.

A bunch of sailors from the Coronado Naval Air Station in the San Diego area are on an excercise in the Pacific Ocean just off land. Looking off to shore, one of the sailors sees coming from some place on shore the same sort of blinking light that ships use to communicate to one another in Morse code. (Technically these lights aren't blinking, of course; it's that the venetian blind-like slats that obscure the light make it look like it's blinking.) The only thing is, this light is blinking "SOS", which unsurprisingly gets their attention. The Navy sends a couple of people out to investigate, and find that it looks like the signal is coming from a regular house.

A group led by Cmdr. Key Weedon (Gig Young) walks right in, thinking it's a real emergency, and find a woman under the sink. That woman is Amy Martin (Shirley Jones), a widowed mother with three sons who are a bit of a handful since they have a knack for getting into trouble even when they don't mean to. The kids, not having a father, immediately like Weedon and Weedon, for his part, likes Amy. Amy would be perfectly willing to consider Weedon a friend, but she absolutely doesn't want to go any farther than that. Her husband was in the navy and died in service, which would explain why she doesn't want to get involved with another Navy man. That and having to move around, since she feels, not without reason, that the young boys need a stable home.

As for the Morse code light, that was given to the boys by their uncle Simon (Red Buttons), a pilot who has a bit of an eccentric streak himself, since who would give young boys that sort of blinker as a present. His next gift for them is even more eccentric: a canister of helium and the sort of weather balloons that the navy used in those days. He then explains to the boys that such balloons are used in astronaut training: gravity on the moon is lower than that on earth, so putting a bunch of balloons on men with a ground harness supposedly simulates what walking on the moon would be like.

Meanwhile, Key keeps pursuing Amy, and would like to propose marriage, but he gets a transfer to Italy, which is really going to make Amy hesitant to accept. But the romantic relationship between Key and Amy gets interrupted by another SOS signal coming from the house. Grover, is trying out the helium balloon thing when he slips the tether and starts floating off, although he seems blithely unware of the danger. Somehow the phone line at the Martin house is out, so Key is going to have to go over to the Martin house to find out what's going on. This leads to the climax as the entire naval base is put into action to save Grover.

A Ticklish Affair starts off as a relatively conventional, if inoffensive, family rom-com. Indeed, just a few months earlier, Jones appeared in The Courtship of Eddie's father, only as the woman gaining a family as the next-door widower is pushed into a relationship with here character. But then that climax comes, and that really takes the movie in a direction that doesn't suit it was as it makes for a finale that's supposed to be zany but is more tedious. Even without such a mishandled climax, however, A Ticklish Affair wouldn't have been as good as The Courtship of Eddie's Father. So you might want to watch this one once just to see how a reasonably premise can go wrong.