How on earth could you possibly forget that?
I think I blocked it out. But it’s true, it’s just not what you expect from a “lighthearted” suburban comedy, to have the next door neighbor lady pop her head in over the half door and go “Isolde? Isolde? anyone home, Isolde?”
Again, makes me wonder if the source novel has hidden depths.
I’ve never seen a Doris Day movie. But the way lissener describes her usual role in the OP makes me, as it would make any reasonable person, wish a slow, horrible death on her usual character and on any RL woman bearing the slightest resemblance to it. So on what level is it “wrong” to cast her in a role where a post-marriage DD character gets, if not a comeuppance, at least some moderate level of humiliation and discomfiture?
Because if seeing a Doris Day movie were exactly the same experience as reading my one-paragraph overview of her entire career and “persona,” well then there’d be no need to actually *make *any Doris Day movies. Your reaction, in other words, is to my paragraph, not to any actual DD-based reality. See *Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, *and That Touch of Mink, and then report back.
In the first place. In the second place, Tunnel of Love was made before all those other “delayed fuck” classics, which were made when she was the number one box office draw in the world for several years running. (IIRC; no cite at present.)
I still don’t get it. Are you saying it’s not funny? Adultery is always funny; so is a paternity-mixup; so is a comedy of errors where the characters and/or the audience aren’t really sure whether some naughtiness has taken place or not. Are you saying the plot isn’t plausible? It’s a 1950s screwball comedy, don’t set the bar so high.
BrainGlutton, its wrongness is all contextual. If you haven’t seen other Doris Day movies (or Richard Widmark movies, for that matter), you have no context. The plot is fairly ridiculous, but it’s primarily the casting that sends it into Bizarroworld.
It would almost have to, wouldn’t it? 
So let me get this straight - hubby fucks the adoption lady, pays her off to keep her quiet, adopts the child, pretends it’s not his, then the adoption lady comes back and basically admits she scammed him, tells him the child’s not his after all and then takes away the child they’ve grown attached to?
Wow, what a barrel of laughs.
Doris Day deserves immortality, if only for inspiring one of my favorite one-liners (by Oscar Levant):
“I knew her before she was a virgin.”
No.
hubby [del]fucks[/del] [wakes up in a motel room with no memory of the evening he spent with] the adoption lady, pays her off [del]to keep her quiet[/del] [to help her with the baby that he believes it’s his responsibility to support], adopts [del]the[/del] [a] child [which he mistakenly believes is his], pretends it’s not his, then the adoption lady comes back and [del]basically admits she scammed him[/del] [repays what she thought was a simple loan], tells him [del]the child’s not his after all[/del] [about the daughter she had, and kept, and is now taking with her to join her husband] and then [del]takes away the child they’ve grown attached to?[/del] [leaves on her merry way, leaving the adoptive parents of the little boy to realize that it was just a coincidence that he looked like the father; that the French chick was “legitimately” pregnant with her husband’s baby, and had only needed a loan from Augie while her husband was anthropologing in the Australian Outback; that Augie, with no memory of the night before, and misconstruing the “demand” for money, didn’t cheat on his wife after all!]
So why is that plot “unforgivable”? Or is it only because of a bizarre casting choice, as cbawlmer said?
It might just be one of those "If you have to ask . . . " things.
Okay, a movie which centers around a happily married woman who is unable to have a child with her husband, who adopts a baby and then finds out that the darling baby that was the answer to her dreams might be the love child of her husband and a beautiful woman, and realizes that if this is the case, her husband knows that the child is his very own son born of adultery and he’s brazenly trying to get his wife to rear it without telling her the truth about his perfidy–this movie should be a comedy!!!
Imagine a doper telling this story on the Dope. Would we be telling her it’s probably just a simple misunderstanding and that night her husband didn’t come home until morning and reeked of gin was probably completely innocent?
It’s a freaky, jangly disconnect, that’s what’s wrong with this movie.
Zackly.
I’m still hung up on the fact that with that story line, they called itThe Tunnel of Love.
I have friends who’ve been trying for years to have a kid. HUGE tragic obstacle for them. They had one kid, after like 10 years of trying, and 9 years later can’t have a second one. Tens of thousands of dollars, miscarriage after miscarriage. Truly not a “funny” situation. So they’ve adopted two kids. Now, I’m imagining the mom discovering that, after all this horrible, tragic time of trying to get pregnant, her husband has a one-nite stand with the woman sent to JUDGE them by the adoption agency, and WHAM he’s able to get HER pregnant! I’m her, my head would explode. I’d kill them both and then myself. Well, maybe I wouldn’t go THAT far overboard. But I can tell you at least one thing I would NOT do: write it up as an urbane comedy! That’s some serious disconnect.
A lot of th e WTF?!?! factor, Brainglutton, is the fact that this is a FIFTIES comedy, a DORIS DAY vehicle, set in the world of* I Love Lucy* (plus martinis). I’d KILL to see the paper trail it left through the Producton Code Office, and what kind of negotiations led to its approval by the Hollywood censors. I can only imagine what they agreed to cut out to make it seem acceptable.
[
Marty was her husband and manager. When he died, she discovered that he had lost or stolen her money, and left her broke. Thought to be one of the reasons she retired as a recluse.
I thought her brokeness was why she did The Doris Day Show for several years after she discovered the financial problems, and the show was popular and eventually got her out of debt.
Yes. She went to work on TV to replenish her bank account, then quit without looking back.