carl Reiner – The Magnificent 60s

Has three unusual distinctions for a Doris Day comedy. First of all, it’s feminist. Secondly, it’s prophetic. Third, and perhaps most interesting of all, is that it plays exactly into expectations – for completely different reasons – for audiences sixty years apart. Only the ending would split the audiences.

And this is a somewhat mature Doris Day. Having shucked off Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, she was no longer stuck in a relatively mindless, however charming, love story following the usual formula of girl-meets-boy girl-loses-boy girl-gets-boy. Here she’s contented housewife Beverly Boyer married to successful obstetrician Dr Gerald Boyer (James Garner) with two kids apt to cause disruption but whose main purpose, equally unusually, is to make caustic comment about grown-up behavior. There is one magnificent outlandish set-piece involving soap powder but the slapstick is toned down and there’s a gentle satire of the television industry and advertising.

There’s only one downside to the marriage, her husband is being called out at all hours to deliver babies and that’s such a worthy calling what decent wife could complain about such absences even if it means spoiled dinners and missing events.

However, everything is turned upside down when by pure chance Beverly takes on the role of becoming the onscreen spokesperson for a brand of soap called Happy Soap. This being in the days of live television – so this is set strictly in the 1950s hence the more pronounced tone of a woman’s place being in the home – she has to do the advertisement live on air and her fumbling and inexperience touch a chord with audiences who respond with such vigor that she is offered a contract that puts her in the position of earning substantially more than her husband. How dare she?

Naturally, the demands placed upon her by the advertising company turns the domestic tables. She’s the one coming home late and he’s the one seen as her adjunct. The soap powder boss is so determined to keep her he fulfills every whim – even when such wishes are not made with any seriousness. So she wakes up one morning with a swimming pool in the back yard which virtually demands that a car drive straight into it.

The battle of the sexes comes down a battle of women’s rights (yes, they are mentioned) against men’s rights, in other words freedom vs toeing the line. Rather than delighted at her extra dough, he’s infuriated that she’s infringing on his perceived role as being the sole provider for the family.

Eventually, he decides the only way to bring her to her senses is to arouse her jealousy by being seen in the company of other women. But that only works up to a point. And she only gives in when she is made to realize – by the only narrative misstep as far as the contemporary audience is concerned – that his job is much more important than hers.

While this is the first of two pairings – the other being Move Over, Darling the same year – between Doris Day and James Garner (Hour of the Gun, 1967) is lacks the purer screen chemistry she found with Cary Grant and Rock Hudson and you feel the plot has been written to accommodate this deficit. There’s little requirement for intimacy or proper wooing, much less for the misunderstandings that fueled the previous pairings.

Doris Day’s haplessness is put to a different use, as it is initially the reason why she proves so appealing to television audiences.

Whether women in the 1960s had to keep to themselves their rooting for the career women in Beverly being given a chance to shine, or whether – the beginnings of the modern feminist movement dating from the publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan published in 1963 – she was seen as a poster girl for the movement I’m not qualified to judge.

These days, however, Beverly would be viewed as an early champion of women’s rights and that, regardless of how important it was that a man tasked with delivering babies had a woman at home to make his dinner and mop his brow, his demands should not take priority.

While there aren’t as many outright laffs as in previous Doris Day comedies, the feminist angle provides the picture with an unusual worthiness, not something you’d go looking for in Day’s portfolio.

Directed by Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968) and written by Carl Reiner (The Art of Love, 1965).

Passage of time has made this more important than the material might suggest. Gets extra marks for serious intent.

It’s a Hollywood trope that successful screen comedians invariably want to test their mettle in more dramatic circumstances. Studios tend to cave in to such self-indulgence, usually with the proviso that the star makes another couple of laff fests with them, but audiences tend to give such enterprises the thumbs down. Dick Van Dyke (Divorce American Style, 1967), on a commercial roll for most of the decade, took the, theoretically at least, easier option of limiting the drama on this one.

Silent films were also on a commercial roll, the oldies having made a comeback via compilation reissues and through slapstick homages such as It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Great Race (1965) so setting the picture in that era in Hollywood’s history seemed a sure thing.

And it starts off bang on the money. A eulogy delivered at a funeral is interrupted by a pie in the face and (as seen above) that device can be utilized at any point.

I’d be telling you to give this complete misfire a miss if it wasn’t for an exceptional final third. The first two-thirds is made up of far too many silent film sequences starring Billy Bright (Dick Van Bright) who goes from vaudeville clown to major star complete with, at the height of his fame, being accorded the honor of a having a clockwork toy made of him.

When it’s not diverted into yet another silent movie sequence, which only serves to show that a modern comedian lacks whatever smarts the silent movie comedians had, the drama takes roughly the same approach, with scenes that could have come from a silent movie if not quite to the utmost.

Thanks to a multitude of affairs Billy burns his way through marriage to Mary (Michele Lee) and thanks to an overfondness for the bottle nearly kills off his career before the arrival of the talkies does that for him.

Eventually, and suddenly, we switch to an entirely different picture, a proper drama, very bold indeed for the time for its portrayal of old age and loneliness – a representation that would chime very much with today’s audiences. You don’t quite warm to this old fella because he wasn’t particularly sympathetic to begin with, but still, in its rawness, this section exerts a very emotional pull.

And, indeed, for Dick Van Dyke it was an incredible piece of acting. He morphs from young, tall, and fit with a head full of hair to an old bloke, bent over, shuffling and with the kind of comb-over that would put Bobby Charlton to shame. He’s been abandoned by everyone except sidekick Martin (Mickey Rooney) whose career has also gone south. They tell lies to each other to keep up their spirits.

The highlight of Billy’s life is getting a set of false teeth and setting the alarm for 4.30am so he can get up and watch reruns of his old movies on television. He lives on boiled eggs and milk.

And he’s still dumb enough to be rooked by a gold-digger. He’s placed an ad in Variety, drawing attention to the fact that he’s still alive, which wins him a spot on a TV chat show which turns into a gig for a commercial which leads a much younger woman to think he must be loaded. He ends up marrying her while in an oxygen tent, but she vanishes when she discovers his newfound fame has led to nothing.

In theory, this is about the side effects of fame, the temptations which few can avoid, and the sudden collapse in income and public awareness when the well runs dry. But, in reality, setting aside the Hollywood overtones, the last third could have been about any lonely old man.

A film of three thirds for the star, in the first two there’s nothing much to hold onto, in the last one he excels. Nobody else has much to do. Directed by Carl Reiner (The Jerk, 1979) and written by him and Aaron Ruben. Reiner had been the writer of The Dick Van Dyke Show so presumably that played a part in him getting the gig.

Died an absolute death at the box office. Not released outside America for decades and then only on DVD.

If it hadn’t been for the final third this would have been rated a one-star effort, it’s such an ill-conceived concept, and disastrous in its execution, but that final third makes it very worthwhile indeed if you can stick with it.

Tag: carl Reiner

The Thrill of It All (1963) ****

The Comic (1969) ***