aramis-112-804880 "The Glass Bottom Boat" offers what, in the mid-1960s, was a powerhouse cast. Some of the stars are still remembered today. Dick Martin and Dom DeLuise, for instance; and Paul Lynde, whose presence was guaranteed to brighten up any dull movie.Some stars have, over the years, lost their lustre. Arthur Godfrey's, for instance. The comedy team Bob & Ray once poked fun at Arthur Godfrey by saying he seemed to be on every station all day long. Godfrey was an early form of Dick Clark. A television pioneer, he was probably most famous during his day for "Talent Scouts," though his credits at the time were numerous.Eric Fleming also has flowed through the fingers like the sands of time. It was Fleming and not Clint Eastwood who was the top-billed star of the then-popular show "Rawhide." Whether Fleming would have gone on to any sort of movie career is unknown since he drowned the same year "Glass Bottom Boat" was released.John McGiver and Edward Andrews are also welcome faces to movie buffs. Though probably most famous for appearances in "Sixteen Candles" and "Gremlins" Andrews had a long and industrious career as a supporting actor.What of the real stars, who are meant to carry the movie? Doris Day is Doris Day. Her acting range was minimal but she was all right if you liked that sort of thing. Her biggest selling point was her singing but, apart from the title song, she has little opportunity to exert her lungs. Though the DVD shows her in some sort of exotic dancing outfit, she's only in it for a few seconds of screen time.As for Rod Taylor, despite anchoring several well-known features (including "Separate Tables" and George Pal's "The Time Machine"), I've always found him an actor lacking in charisma. Early on in "GBB" he has his shirt off. I suppose beef-cake is his biggest selling point. To me, his best acting job was the voice work he did in Disney's animated "101 Dalmations." The Glass Bottom Boat itself has little screen time. This is not a movie about oceanography, though that might have made it interesting. It's a movie about space. In the 1960s, space was the big thing, and everyone from Gregory Peck ("Marooned") to Don Knotts ("the Reluctant Astronaut") were making pictures about astronauts.The movie seems to be about some aspect of the space program, with spies trying to get their hands on some gismo or the other. The actual plot hardly matters. It's just an excuse to let grown people run around like children. And not-too-bright children, at that. I had just turned five when this movie came out, and I didn't want to see it. My parents and brother went, but I protested and spend a lovely evening with my grandmother instead. Viewing it at last as an adult, I believe I made the right decision.The best thing that can be said about "The Glass Bottom Boat" is that it is innocuous, with some very funny stuff interspersed in all the other goings-on.

Robert J. Maxwell Frank Tashlin, a former cartoonist and animator, made a couple of hilarious comedies in the 50s -- "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" and "The Girl Can't Help It." The material was good to begin with but Tashlin buffed it up to a high gloss.The same can't be said for "The Glass Bottom" boat, a story which is unfocused and a little slapdash. The wit is almost entirely slapstick or absurd in a curiously shivery way. You want something from the early 60s? You'll find it in here somewhere. There's Rod Taylor as the head of some super-duper space project involving the CIA, Russian spies trying to steal the secret formula, and security agencies trying to prevent it.There's Doris Day as the cute, very sun-tanned, and infinitely desirable woman he hires to help him write his autobiography but is really there just to be around him. She's mistaken for a Soviet spy because her dog is named Vladimir. There are Dom DeLuise and Paul Lynde at odds with each other. DeLuise gets his foot stuck in a trash can filled with banana cream cake. Day, trying to help him, gets her foot stuck too. This is known as a funny scene. Paul Lynde dresses in various disguises and tries to fool Day into revealing her true identity. This is also funny.Well, as they say, if you don't have eggs you can't make an omelet. No, wait. That's not what they say. They say -- wait a minute -- yes, they say you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and the problem here is that the eggs are kind of soft boiled. The gags just aren't very funny.I'll give you an example. Doris visit Rod's house in order to bake him a cake. First, he has to show her around his ultra-modern kitchen. It's full of robotic gadgets of various kinds, each accompanied by its own boop-boop-de-doop electronic sounds as it does its business. Let's see. There's the automatic incinerator, run by "a photoelectric cell." Then there's the robot egg beater. Then there's the sentient vacuum cleaner that zips out of a panel in the wall and sucks up whatever happens to be dropped on the floor. (I could use one of them.) A full FIVE MINUTES is spent on demonstrating these modern labor-saving devices. And the last one -- when the vacuum cleaner comes out and begins sucking on Day's big toe, which is not a bad idea in and of itself, and after a tug of war finally makes off with her flip-flop and dashes back into the wall with it -- why, that's a real knee slapper.Rod Taylor is really quite good, confident in his Aussie masculinity. But Day, over 40, looks great. Everything about her body and face is chipper and tan, and wardrobe has given her a lot of white garments, including an infinitely inviting pleated white skirt, that sets off her tawny legs in an almost salacious fashion.It's clumsily done and crude. The kids will get every gag in it. But if you're desperate for diversion, this may do the job. You get to hear Doris Day sing a song that sounds like "Hush, Little Baby, Don't You Cry," but the subject of which is sea food.

Psalm 52 It's NOT! Instead this badly edited, terribly scored, loosely plotted dreck is only of value as a mindless mid-60's time-capsule w/ a large roster of recognizable TV-land faces in supporting roles: there's gay Uncle Arthur from "Bewitched" as a nosy, gay NASA security guard who dresses in drag to follow Ms. Day into a women's restroom; also from "Bewitched" there's Gladys and "Abner, come quickly!" as nosy neighbors (DUH!) of Ms. Day (I was half-expecting Endora to show up floating); there's a cameo from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."; there's not-terribly-suave Martin (one half of "Martin and Rowan's Laugh-In) as a secondary love interest for Day, and he has a truly dead-on silly line when mistakenly caught in bed w/ an Air Force General "You want to meet early and pick out the furniture?"; there's even Godfrey as Day's father (more like slightly-older brother as Day and him are close in age); and there's even Grandma Walton as a senior citizen Girl Friday battling a wayward robot vacuum cleaner!The slightly better acted supporting roles belong to DeLuise as a bumbling pseudo-foreign agent who has some silly funny scenes w/ Day (the early foot caught in waste basket scene and the latter water gun scene); and Taylor as a stud-scientist who battles and romances Day in the workplace. Speaking of workplace, Ms. Day works at NASA which happens to be based in Cape Kennedy, Florida, but yet she commutes (by car no less!) to a home in Los Angeles, California!!!!! This implausibility results in unintended laughs when after a long day at work in Florida Ms. Day makes plans to boat over to Catalina. BTW: is there any simple task that Day can take on that doesn't turn into disaster? It's not that she plays dumb-blonde, but that her character is accident-prone (ie.- the heel caught in the grate, the Banana Crème pie fiasco, the unpiloted speed boats debacles, the fish hook/mermaid suit accident, the pie baking kitchen scene, etc.) and even worse she's middle-age but playing a role twenty years younger!There's one unintended telling moment in the movie (towards the very end) when terribly under-used actor McGiver (who if you blinked earlier on you would have missed his earlier scene) reappears in the middle of chaos (DUH!) and asks the other actors "What's going on?" Truly telling commentary on this fiasco of a movie.

Michael DeZubiria I say eventually because it takes about three quarters of the film before it appears to have a thought in its head, and even then it's not by much and only briefly. My problem with the movie is that for the vast majority of it, Doris Day's character Jenny is the typical stupid blonde, cheerfully grinning like a moron and twirling her hair, clueless to what is going on around her. I have a hard time getting over this kind of thing when I see it in the movies because I dated one or two girls that acted like that because they thought it was cute and it drives me out of my mind.It's incredible to me that the romance between Jenny and Mr. Templeton was ever considered romantic, it's so contrived and pretentious. The slapstick situations are shallowly manufactured, badly acted and thus not funny, but the heavy hand of the sixties is all over the movie, so at least it is a slightly interesting look at a different time as well as the kind of thing that was considered entertaining and romantic forty years ago. The movie takes a turn for the better when Jenny figures out what's going on by listening in on a phone call between Templeton and his military buddies and then decides to turn the tables on them, although it should be noted that during that phone call he insists that Jenny simply can't be a spy, she hasn't got the brains. She's offended and so are we, until we remember that he's right. Afterwards, she begins to display an intellect which had been largely absent thus far, but unfortunately, everyone else in the movie turns stupid in order to lead to a lot more goofy slapstick. It is telling that one of the first things that brings suspicion onto Jenny is a series of misunderstandings stemming from the fact that her dog's name is Vladimir. Strangely enough, the reason I watched the movie is because I took my girlfriend to Catalina Island recently for her birthday, and we took a tour in the exact same glass bottom boat which was used in this movie, and I thought it would be interesting to see the film shot in the boat I was sitting in, as well as to see what the astonishingly beautiful Avalon (the tiny town on Catalina Island) looked like in the mid 1960s. Needless to say, I was surprised to see that Avalon looks almost exactly the same, and that the glass bottom boat appears in the first five minutes or so of the movie and is never seen again. Odd that they would name the film after such an irrelevant plot device. Also don't miss the extra features on the DVD, one of which is a short video in which MGM claims that every girl's dream is to visit the MGM Studios in Culver City.