Space Chase

The Glass Bottom Boat uses space-age wizardry and spy fiction to fizz up the formula for a Doris Day sex comedy. As usual, the man cast opposite her has to perform somewhat like the catcher in a flashy female trapeze act, and Rod Taylor doughtily goes through the motions of Doris-appreciation without losing his grip. As a combination scientific whiz kid and loverboy, Rod invents an anti-gravity device, heads a U.S. space center for NASA, goes home after launch to a more or less circular pad with a guest wing as roomy as a Holiday Inn. One unit is decorated in passionate red, and the whole house is the sort of marshmallow dream that Hollywood merchants manufacture year after year to spoon glamour into the dull, grey life of your average mortgage-holder.

Doris, having graduated from unimpeachable virginity to semi-approachable young widowhood with every girlish giggle intact, embodies outdoorsy allure as a scatterbrain who dotes on talking birds and tropical fish. While conducting tours at the space center, she telephones her dog Vladimir several times daily, just the sort of thing to alarm the security people. Doris ultimately proves that she is not an enemy agent. She runs amuck in a remote-controlled speedboat, does battle with a ferocious robot vacuum cleaner and sprawls aloft in an antigravity chamber.

To balance ups with downs, Doris plays mermaid for her salty dad, Arthur Godfrey, who makes his painless and pointless film debut as the skipper of a glass bottom boat for sea-sighters. At one point Godfrey takes up his ukulele to strum a Doris Day hit tune of yore. The old pro may believe that reminiscing is as good a way as any to buoy up spirits aboard a doomed ship.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.