Well, I finally got around to watching this 1960 Doris Day/David Niven “comedy” for the first time. It was pretty much a waste of time.
I always considered David Niven to be rather hot, and that was the only thing that kept me watching. Sadly, even that wasn’t enough to hold my interest.
I think the word that sums it up is: bland. The plot was bland, the characters were bland, the dialog was bland, and the few songs were embarrassingly worse than bland. Even by comedic standards, there was just an overall lack of substance. And Doris Day achieved the pinnacle of superficial perkiness, so much that I wanted to slap her back to reality. I found myself hoping that Janis Paige would succeed in seducing David Niven, just to add something interesting to the plot. But that, like everything else, just fizzled out. (Janis Paige and the woman who took over the family’s apartment were the film’s only interesting characters.) Even the kids . . . who could have been the source of comedic situations . . . turned out to be as “wholesome” as their parents.
This film had a lot of “star power” (Doris Day, David Niven, Janis Paige, Richard Haydn, Jack Weston and Spring Byington), and didn’t utilize any of their talents.
