Underwhelming comedy which made me consistently wonder "what is the point of this?" "Why are we watching this?" Terry Thomas is a professor at a Los Angeles college - there's some funny early stuff with some of his female students being obsessed with him, which made me laugh. But then the plot kicks in and doesn't have much to do with it - he's engaged to Celeste Holm and Holm's daughter Tuesday Weld turns up and Thomas has a lecherous neighbour Richard Beymer.
Terry Thomas runs around in his boxer shorts a lot while drunk. There's a comic dog (who is funny), a dinosaur bone, women throwing themselves at Terry Thomas. It's all so contrived - there's really no good reason why Holm didn't tell Thomas about Weld, or why she pretends to be a delinquent, or why Thomas tries to hide her. It's sloppily plotted and the jokes and charm aren't enough to compensate.
There's a lot of Richard Beymer, the bucktoothed heartthrob of the early 60s. He's fine, not terrible - but he's not as good as, say, Jim Hutton. It's a good role for Weld who does fine - playing a person who acts all sorts of roles which is interesting. Terry Thomas plays it in cartoon style - which is fine, I guess, but I didn't care what happened to him. The one moment I cared for the characters was a scene between Beymer and Weld on the beach, this was sweet.
It's frantic and occasionally pervy, like a lot of Tashlin directed films (lots of shots of female legs, a scene with a girl lying on a wobble board and her boobs move). It's full of Tashlin touches like bright colour and movement and jokes about Jayne Mansfield. It's just not very funny.
I liked the views of Malibu. And there's a good support performance from Francesca Bellini, who I wasn't familiar with, who plays a girlfriend of Beymer. Actually the acting in this is fine - the cast all commit - it's the dodgy script.
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