Saturday, September 22, 2007

Movie review - "Operation Petticoat" (1959) ***

This has one of the all time great concepts - well, for a leering 50sc omedy anyway: a bunch of nurses hitch a ride on a sub in WW2 just after Pearl Harbour. So its surprising that it takes around 40 minutes for the nurses to come into play - indeed, at two hours the film is much too long.
Cary Grant and Tony Curtis are well teamed as the leads - Curtis does a version of Ensign Pulver but it's a very good one and the casino and escapade with a pig are both very funny.
Love the character of the big boobed klutzy nurse - that's all she is, big b*obs and klutzy, constantly interrupting people in corridors.
Didn't much like Curtis' romance with Dina Merrill - he's supposed to be this louse but she meets him and goes "I'm going to marry him" then gets upset when he says she's engaged... where does she get off assuming he's going to marry her? It's not like true love, more like a desperate woman trying to trap someone into something he doesn't want to do. I didn't like them winding up together at the end, he would have been better off hooking up with the rich girl (and I didn't believe Curtis would stay in the navy after the war, either).
Story wise I think it would have been better had the sub done something really useful at the end, like sink a Japanese ship. This is an early example of metrosexual comedy, with Curtis being a skilled dancer, jokes about underwear, the ship's crew suffering labour pains - women are generally shown to be a positive influence on men, apart from the sequence where the klutz stops Grant from sinking a ship

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