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After a pre-credits sequence anticipating A Dandy in Aspic and The Spy Who Loved Me, Frank Tashlin introduces the heroine in a trim spoof of Marnie (yellow bag and all) and declares the industrial espionage intrigue just so much underarm deodorant. The joke on alienated relationships has Doris Day adrift in the late Sixties of double-crosses and swinging beds, "the spy who came in from the cold cream." From the Swiss Alps to Paris to Southern California and back, Richard Harris as the Bondian smoothie and Ray Walston as the baleful chemist with a touch of Elmer Fudd. The Blowup studio has one of the glitzy fembots upside-down in the camera's eye, the MacGuffin is a water-repellent shampoo (cf. Stay-Put Lipstick, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) linked to a narcotics ring. Double agents everywhere, sometimes it takes the prick of truth serum to get to the bottom of things. "Oh, you know us American tourists. We're nosy." Romantic façades amidst modish fads, a matter of cosmetics, the excoriation comes not long after Losey (Modesty Blaise). The cartoonist-auteur in rare form: Irene Tsu in a bikini with an enormous Great Dane by her side as Day dangles from a ledge in a polka-dot dress is Tashlin at his freest, his aversion to gadgetry is marvelously illustrated in the amplified crunch of potato chips that handily overwhelms surveillance technology. The pantsless inspector by the Eiffel Tower in the last hurrah for Cinemascope, the title song in the self-referential theater while a shaggy Michael J. Pollard fondles the protagonist's leg. Tashlin is always moral, says Godard, "how can I get the girl in the end, unless I'm a good guy?" With Jack Kruschen, Edward Mulhare, Lilia Skala, Larry D. Mann, and Fritz Feld.
--- Fernando F. Croce |