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The joke is immemorial, Old World and New World (cp. McCarey's Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!), the prelude has the revolutionary musketeer cuckolded by the tweedy Redcoat. For the opening credits Frank Tashlin reverses the most famous sequence from The Girl Can't Help It, the bombshell is the British archeology academic (Terry-Thomas) and the oglers university coeds, one leans dreamily on the water fountain and splashes her boyfriend's face. "I dig that crazy homework you do, Professor!" The Santa Monica beach bungalow accommodates the fuddy-duddy, the runaway nymphet (Tuesday Weld) crashing it is actually the daughter of his traveling fiancée (Celeste Holm). A delicate matter for the gentleman-scientist, a promising case for the barrister wannabe in the trailer (Richard Beymer): "I don't get rid of wayward girls, I collect them." In the bedroom women shoved in and out of closets, in the living room a large fossilized femur pulled out of its crate, Jessica the dachshund drags it across the sand in one of several CinemaScope gags. (Another one places Francesca Bellini diagonally on a vibrating massage bed and offers her a slice of chocolate cake.) The Nabokov element from Susan Slept Here is luxuriously elucidated in a virtual remake, and one year ahead of Kubrick there's Weld ya-yaing by the stove. The Cro-Magnon gap, "a dinosaur on a hot tin roof," the Jekyll and Hyde cocktail. Nobly contemplating the Tashlin landscape is Terry-Thomas, pressing two dishes to his bosom while crying for milk before a bedeviled dash into the surf, umbrella fully erect. "Do it where the lipstick is!" A California rain is the miracle needed, Mackendrick's Don't Make Waves takes meticulous note. With Howard McNear, Roxanne Arlen, and Alice Reinhardt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |