Review of Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960) by Stephen M — 01 May 2008

Larry and Kay McKay are really Walter and Jean Kerr. He was a famous theater critic who covered the Broadway theater scene and she was a writer. Their experiences as a family became fodder for her book of anecdotes, Please Don't Eat the Daisies. That book became a huge hit and was made into a movie..

But you can't just make a movie out of a book of anecdotes - so they made a movie about their life together.

Ta Da!

So the film Please Don't Eat The Daisies actually has very little to do with the source material - only the little incidentals like the kids and the water balloons, the child they keep in the cage.. things like that. The rest of it was all created for this film; and the result is delightful. It's not a wildly exciting story but it has charm and wit and the success of it all rests, squarely, on the shoulders of Doris Day. Oh, David Niven is marvelous and he is certainly a beautiful actor who delivers his part with natural abilities... And Janis Paige is funny and dry and sexy; and, of course, Richard Haydn is wonderfully bitchy. The truth is, though, that the reason this film is so beloved, the reason it was a hit, the reason it has so many loyal fans (me being one of the biggest) is that wonderful, incomparable, irreplacable.

Miss.

Doris.

Day.

The movie is worth a look, especially for people like me who have a thing for movies of the 60s.

ALSO worth a look, if you can find it, is the original book.