Unforgivable movie (old, obscure, you don't care)

Cafe Society
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Tomorrow, Monday, April 3, TCM is presenting an all-Day marathon.

The movie that inspired this thread is scheduled for 11:00 Central Daylight time (choose your timezone from the pulldown).

It’s interesting that they’re not playing any of the megahits that made her the biggest star in the world for several years: no Pillow Talk, no That Touch of Mink. Instead we’re getting a acouple of her more interesting flicks. In Love Me or Leave Me, a biography [sic] of the great Ruth Etting, she is violently (by 1955 Hollywood standards) abused by James Cagney. Some great old songs in this one. *Julie *is as close to Doris ever came to making a film noir. If someone else had played the title, it would definitely be a noir, but the mere presence of Doris Day is utterly antithetical to the concept. Still, it’s interesting to see the black-and-white Doris Day being stalked by a killer. (Which she was again, later, in color, in Midnight Lace, a thin Hitchcock pastiche, which is not being shown tomorrow.)

Glass Bottom Boat, a kind of James Bond parody, is not a very good movie, but it has some wonderful moments in it: Day does some of her best comedy, there’s a hilarious cameo by Robert Vaughn, some of the bedroom farce double-entendre toward the end is pretty funny, and Paul Lynde in full glorious drag is a sight not soon to be recovered from.

The first film of the day, My Dream Is Yours, is notable mostly for the wonderful performance by the greatest side-chick of all time, Eve Arden, and the pioneering animation/live sequence of the Bugs Bunny dream. Vaguely interesting as well as the story of a single mother; such a subject was frowned upon in 1949.

Me, I’m not a fan of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies or Billy Rose’s Jumbo, but each has its following.

Anyway, in light of the discussion this thread engendered, I thought it behooved me to let everyone know about the upcoming Day Day. Have fun. Report back.

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Me too, but this says that Doris Day is still alive.

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Yes, very much alive. I assume the “assuming” just meant he didn’t feel like looking it up, not that he assumed she was dead.

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Well people, it’s happened. This bizarre movie has become available on DVD.

Please save me from the fate of being the only person in the universe who has this movie in his brain.

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I just read the OP.

Pass.

:wink:

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“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Yes. I did it. I watched it again.

Fut. The. Wuck. I honestly cannot think of any code-era movie that has anywhere near the amount of sexual innuendo this movie has. And most of it’s not even innuendo, it’s pretty much right out there. There are no actual penetration shots, but almost every conversation in the movie centers on one couple’s attempts to get pregnant; their next-door-neighbors science-fictional fertility (the wife next door wears maternity clothes even when she’s not pregnant); and the respective husbands’ extracurricular sexual escapades.

I can’t begin to fathom how this movie got past the Hays Office, when just 5 years prior Otto Preminger had gone toe-to-toe with the censors over The Moon Is Blue, simply because its protagonist tells a suitor that she wants to remain a virgin until she’s married.

The disc includes a trailer for the film, in which the omnipresent movie-trailer voice says something like, “They said it couldn’t be made, but we made it!” And the Variety review says “The Broadway hit on which this is based has been transferred virtually intact to the screen.” I’d LURRRV to find out exactly what that “virtually” is masking. Doris Day shooting pingpong balls out of her vadge? Was there a subplot that involved bukkake?

Deeply flawed as this movie is–and boy is it–it’s an interesting footnote in the story of the Code.

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What people forget is that the Code did not fall all at once: from the late 1940s onward it acceded to changes. Jane Wyman is raped and becomes pregnant in Johnny Belinda, Vivien Leigh is raped and has a mental breakdown in A Streetcar Named Desire, Jeanne Crain is a mixed-race woman who becomes involved with a white man in Pinky, Lauren Bacall in Young Man With a Horn and Anne Baxter in All About Eve seem to prefer the ladies, Dorothy Dandridge is seen in her bra and underpants in Carmen Jones, Susan Hayward is a prostitute in I Want to Live!, Frank Sinatra was a heroin addict in The Man With a Golden Arm, Doris Day and Louis Jourdan are in bed together in Julie as are Susan Hayward and Charlton Heston The President’s Lady, Don Murray says “God damn it!” in Bus Stop, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach compete to see who will deflower the former’s teenage bride in Baby Doll, and a young girl commits several murders in The Bad Seed.

The strict Joseph Breen retired from the Production Code Administration in 1955, and was replaced by the less dogmatic Geoffrey Shurlock. The Code was modified in 1956, allowing many heretofore forbidden subjects. After 1961, there was no topic that was forbidden by the Code, as long as images and language were not offensive. Hence in 1962 Peter O’Toole is raped in Lawrence of Arabia and James Mason carries on with his adolescent stepdaughter in Lolita. In 1966 the Code itself was dropped.

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Drop everything and hunt out his Ealing comedies, epecially The Man In The White Suit, which is comedy genius, and Kind Hearts And Coronets, which for 1949 is about as black as black comedy gets: Guinness plays multiple roles in the latter, brilliantly.

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In the play, the the husband really is the father of the adoption agent’s baby. She seduces him because she’s doing a paper on the problems that unwed mothers have.

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People? Perhaps, Walloon, but I know all about the items you reference; I have half a bookshelf dedicated to books just about the Code. So it was in that context that I was surprised at the amount and explicitness of the references to shall we say human reproduction. I can’t personally think of any American movie between the fall of the censor’s curtain and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf–the film most often credited as the camel-breaking straw–that even approaches The Tunnel of Love. What’s even odder is that in all my reading on the Code and the movies that shaped its development while it was in place, not a single one I’ve ever read has mentioned this movie. I know it was a commercial flop, but was it really that obscure?

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I hope you’re ashamed that you know that.

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Just because you don’t have any appreciation for the classics…that movie was probably the best movie from the '50s directed by Gene Kelly about false accusations of infidelity.

The NYT said of it “But the fact is that all the fuss and bother are spent over one minor gag that wears awfully thin before the finish. It’s a “Little Accident,” updated just a bit.”

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And of course “Little Accident” ain’t to be had for love nor money. Nor is “Blessed Event.”

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There was an abortion.

elenorigby’s recollection of PfH is a lot sunnier than I remember the movie being!

Btw, the leading lady was Bernadette Peters.

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Well, I’m glad to hear that. I was going to google her as soon as I finished reading this thread because I wondered if I missed something in the news this week.

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Casanova Brown is, though.

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Coming in before the zombie police close the thread to say that I love ALL Doris Day’s movies and you can start a new thread any time. There are THREE new books about her, all of which I’ve read and each enlightening in its own way.