Review of The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) by Edith N — 09 Dec 2008

Of course, this being a Doris Day movie, the push-button kitchen in it is played for laughs, generally at the expense of Doris Day. That being said, I fail to see how a kitchen as complicated as the one shown here could be anything [i]but[/i] a failure. For example, take the mixer that's tucked into the counter. Every mixer I've ever owned has ended up splattered in gunk at one point or another. It's the nature of the sort of thing that requires a mixer in the first place. So if gunk gets on a mixer, wouldn't it get into all those fiddly little moving parts? Or at least, wouldn't it be likely to? And wouldn't that gum up the mechanism? I'm just saying that, eventually, the mixer wouldn't move so smoothly and easily. Eventually, the thing would get stuck. It wouldn't take Doris Day-ish hilarity for the kitchen to get all screwed up.

Doris Day works at NASA. Oh, I know--I find it pretty unbelievable, too. In fact, we first see her as a "mermaid" who appears under glass-bottom boat tours run by (I think) her father (Arthur Godfrey?). A fisherman, Bruce Templeton (Rod Taylor), catches his line on her bottom, and she loses it. For some reason, it's all she's wearing. It later turns out that Templeton is some genius scientist, and Doris Day as Jennifer Nelson is a tour guide. In an effort to woo her, he somehow gets her . . . okay, I have no idea what's going on for most of the movie. Somehow, because she has a dog called Vladimir--whom she calls every day so he gets exercise running around and barking at the phone--the fine folks at NASA begin to think she's a spy.

I lost track of what was going on in part because it didn't make any sense. After all, isn't "I have a dog named Vladimir" the sort of thing that you get in basic, getting-to-know-you conversation? I mean, most of my friends know that I have an exceptionally stupid cat named D, and most of the people who know about D know that his full name is actually El Diablo--and, indeed, a fair number of people know that I didn't name him. This is basic information, surely. This is the sort of thing that I'd share with someone with whom I was trying to create any kind of serious relationship, and it is utterly unheard of for Doris Day movies to include attempts at anything but. And yet, without that detail, it somehow--I don't know how--makes it probable that the vapid Widow Nelson (yes, she's a widow, and no, we don't get any detail about her first marriage) is a spy. Supposedly, this is practically all the US government needs to start surveillance. Then again, Hoover still ran the FBI.

Unlike [i]That Touch of Mink[/i], we don't get Cary Grant. Unlike [i]Pillow Talk[/i], we don't get Rock Hudson. Even unlike [i]The Thrill of It All[/i], which I loathe, we don't get James Garner. Rod Taylor is such a nonentity that IMDB doesn't provide a picture of him. (Though he is still alive and due to play Winston Churchill next year.) It takes examination of his filmography to remember that he was the hero in [i]The Birds[/i], too. Doris Day's character--in this and practically everything else she ever did--requires a stronger male presence. Not just a man who'd be willing to pretend to like banana cream cake (yuck!) for her, but a man who we can see ourselves going for. Not the sort of bland alleged genius we have here, a man whose greatest demonstration of genius is, frankly, that ridiculous kitchen.

Even by Doris Day standards, in short, it's an extraordinarily dumb movie. It's not painfully bad, but it's dull. It doesn't have the charm of [i]Pillow Talk[/i] or the outright vileness of [i]The Thrill of It All[/i]. In fact, about the only reason I'd recommend seeking it out at all is that, well, the DVD also comes with "The Dot and the Line," the classic Chuck Jones cartoon. That's not quite reason enough, really, but it's better than actually watching the movie.