Delbert Mann (1961)

Carol Templeton is a rising star in the world of advertising.  Doris Day, who plays Carol, is a misfit in the Madison Avenue of the early 1960s – and not just because she’s a high-flying female.   Carol’s incongruousness in New York is intentional – and meant to be comical: she’s from Nebraska – but Doris Day comes from another world in terms of personality.  Radiating hygienic rectitude, she’s like a bossy school teacher among the louche male executives.  Delbert Mann’s direction and the script by Paul Henning and Stanley Shapiro seem to want to make Carol ridiculous but they succeed only superficially.  She wears a sequence of hats that look silly and stick out like sore thumbs on the crowded New York street.  She often looks overdressed below the neck too but this is partly because Carol is conspicuous as the only woman on screen who’s not either a floosie dancer or a mere secretary.  She also keeps being outwitted by her professional nemesis Jerry Webster (Rock Hudson), whose creativity is limited but who’s a world-class schmooze-artist.  Since Carol doesn’t claim to be sophisticated, it seems unkind to poke fun at her gullibility – but the film-makers’ attempts to do so don’t really work anyway because of Doris Day:  she’s so electrifyingly competent that she’s invulnerable.  When Carol trips on something left lying on the floor of an apartment, Day’s false steps look almost choreographed – the trip emphasises her physical comedy skills and indeed her balance.  When she kicks off her shoes casually, the effect is one of fine precision.  The downside of Doris Day’s dazzling briskness, on this occasion, is that it detracts from the romantic comedy that Lover Come Back is meant to be.

The plot is all about deception.  Jerry Webster pretends to be Dr Linus Tyler, a chemist whom Jerry’s hired to concoct a product which doesn’t exist but which, for reasons not worth explaining (the satire of advertising mores is very obvious), Jerry and his company president (Tony Randall) need to exist.   I was drowsing shortly before the first scene in which Rock Hudson passes himself off as the unworldly inventor and I wondered if Carol too was dissimulating but she wasn’t:  it was just the artificiality in Doris Day’s playing.  Carol falls for Dr Tyler:  when he turns out to be a man she’s never met but whom she knows she loathes she switches neatly from infatuation to hopping- mad censure and is sufficiently self-possessed to exact immediate, humiliating revenge on Jerry.  She’s self-possessed in spite of having drunk a glass of champagne and the fact that you’ve been led to believe that one drop of alcohol will be enough to make her helpless.  Forgetting this frailty at a crucial moment for the sake of plot convenience is a cheat – especially when the real Dr Tyler’s invention then turns out to be an intoxicating candy which does disable Carol:  she sleeps with Jerry and wakes up to find herself married to him.

In a rushed finale, she gets the marriage annulled but, after giving birth to a baby who’s the fruit of their one-night stand, Carol decides she wants to marry Jerry again.   This upbeat ending has the opposite effect:  there’s been nothing to suggest that Carol and Jerry (as opposed to Carol and Linus Tyler) could live happily ever after so their remarriage seems a hellish prospect, and leaves you with a feeling more unpleasant than anti-climax.  Lover Come Back fails to deliver as rom-com – on the premise that opposites attract and true love eventually overcomes all tensions between them.  It delivers only on its own determination to show Carol Templeton as having learned her lesson for trying to succeed in a man’s world, by becoming the wife and mother that a woman is meant to be.  The same thing happens in Pillow Talk (also co-written by Stanley Shapiro) – the Doris Day character is a career-girl interior decorator destined to be a homemaker – but there’s a difference in the chemistry between her and Rock Hudson in the earlier movie.  In Lover Come Back, Day simply switches her feelings on and off, according to what’s needed at a particular point of the story.

Rock Hudson is amusing and pleasantly relaxed.  He’s playing a man who’s pretending to be a man who (as the nerdy scientist) isn’t cut out for marriage:  Hudson’s own life – as so often when you see his films at this distance in time – gives the film an unintended edge.  But his inherent gentleness makes some of the broad comic routines that Hudson is asked to go through more appealing than they would be with a more vivid, dynamic performer.  His good looks lend Linus Tyler’s tentativeness and modesty a peculiar charge.  Tony Randall, as Jerry’s boss, is funny, combining a dapper exterior with scarcely suppressed hysteria in his voice.   With Jack Kruschen as the real Dr Tyler, Edie Adams as a chorus girl, and Jack Albertson.  The songs have the feel of trying, and failing, to replicate the perky energy of earlier Doris Day-movie title songs.   The incidental music by Frank DeVol needlessly underlines the characters’ emotions and reactions.

19 July 2013