This has been bugging me for years. I’ll bet you guys can answer it in 10 minutes.
As a pre-teen sometime between 1966 and 1972 I saw a movie on TV with a scene that stuck with me for reasons that will be apparent–but I don’t know the name of the movie, any of the actors involved or even the overall plot. Here’s the part I recall:
A young woman is walking by a pool at a high-rise apartment building (possibly a hotel but I don’t think so) at night when she sees a drunken man in the pool who can’t swim. She rescues him and takes him upstairs to an apartment. Because her clothes are wet she has removed them to dry them by the fire and is wearing a towel. The man wakes up, still drunk and now horny too, and starts chasing her around the room. I think she knocks on the head with something, and goes out on the balcony before he recovers and resumes pursuit. She jumps over to the next balcony and enters the darkened apartment next door. In trying to sneak through that room, she makes a noise and awakens a man sleeping in the room. She runs off with this curious guy in pursuit. She gets into an elevator just as the doors close, but the towel gets caught in the door. We don’t see inside the elevator, but along with the curious man we she is separated from the towel.
I also remember being “intrigued” by an episode of That Girl where she gets her toe caught in the drain while taking a bubble bath and has to call a plumber. Or was that also “Love American Style”?
Google says you are correct. In fact the top response to my search is called “What Inspired Your Foot Fetish?” – but I’m pretty sure I was more interested in other parts.
I took the liberty of posting your question on the IMDB board, and one of the experts there posited that your movie might be All in a Night’s Work (1961), with Shirley MacLaine as the “towel woman.” And it has Dean Martin, who would presumably have been the drunk.
This is definitely the movie, although I misremembered a key detail. Here’s part of a comment from an IMDB reviewer:
“After saving a lecherous old playboy from drowning, [Shirley MacLaine] has to fend off his advances in the best Doris Day manner. In doing so she stumbles into the room of her boss, the owner of the magazine she works for and Dean Martin’s uncle, wearing nothing but a towel. A very officious house detective, Jack Weston, spots her in said towel as she’s leaving the room. It turns out that her boss had passed away that night and Weston’s beady little mind suspects scandal…One thing does puzzle me. After Weston removes the towel through the elevator door. Just how does a nude Shirley MacLaine get back to her room?”
That last question was what I’ve wondered about off an on all these years. I always suspected it was answered in dialogue and I just missed or forgot it. Now it appears that no answer was given in the movie.
