MartinHafer It's hard to imagine what anyone was thinking when they made "The Tunnel of Love". After all, the film is supposed to be a comedy but it's rarely even remotely funny. It's also amazingly sleazy...but must have rubbed audiences wrong back in 1958...especially with America's sweetheart, Doris Day, in the lead! According to biographies, Day's husband at the time frankly pushed her into a lot of terrible projects and all he cared about was her money....and after his death she learned he'd pretty much spent her vast fortune. Isolde (Doris Day...Isolde?!) and Augie (Richard Widmark) have been married for a few years but are childless. She wants to adopt a child and he, somewhat reluctantly, agrees. But they seem like an ill- suited couple for adoption, as he seems to have a drinking problem and his best friend is a pig who seems willing to sleep with anyone other than his wife. When the worker from an adoption agency comes to their house to talk with Augie, he's a bit drunk and behaves in a very boorish manner. He spends the interview in his boxers, drinking and making suggestive comments to her. Not surprisingly, she stomps off...as any sane woman would have done that. Oddly, however, she soon comes back and then she goes with Augie out to drink some more. He wakes up in a hotel room later and thinks they slept together. Then, when the agency offers them a child about 9 months later, he thinks maybe it's HIS baby he fathered with this nutty social worker! Hilarity is meant to ensue...but doesn't. And, oddly, by the end, Isolde is apologizing to Augie and all is forgiven.There is nothing funny about this nor is there anything romantic. Adultery is really NOT comedy gold nor is bad parenting...and you honestly wonder how the writing could have been worse! The actors try their best (Widmark tries a bit TOO hard) but it's all a mess of a film...something no one should have agreed to make in the first place.

ryancm While DORIS DAY has made a few lame movies in her 20 year movie career, this may not be the lamest, but it certainly comes close. Based on a stage play, and it shows, this stupid comedy makes no sense what so ever. The characters are card board cut outs, especially Gig Young's character. He is terrible in this role and the role itself is horrific. A skirt chaser, a heavy drinker, an unloving father and husband and a pill popper to boot. What a disaster of a man. The writers should be ashamed of themselves. The Gia Scala character makes no sense at all. The actress committed suicide a few years after this fiasco. She must have seen the film. As for Doris, she is regulated to a stupid supporting role. She isn't even in 70% of the run time. Mr. Young has more footage than she. And what she does toward the end makes for a very mixed-up character, which she doesn't display earlier. And poor Richard Widmark. He tries, oh he does, but to no avail. Too bad, because he's in every minute of this movie. Based on what I had to say maybe this IS the lamest film Miss Day has appeared in. Another grip is that the Gig Young/Elizabeth Frazer couple have four kids. They are NEVER seen. Liz has a baby during the film and no one takes care of it? Both men are in a scene at the Widmark/Day residence and the women are out bike riding. Where are the kids and baby? During the party, where are the kids? In the party scene given for Widmark/Day, no one talks to them nor do they talk to anyone but Young and Frazer, just like no one is around. Both couples have twin beds yet. OK, this was made in the 50's, but still....And the direction by Gene Kelly....THERE IS NONE... One of many stupid lines....HE: Let's get to the party. SHE: We don't want to be the first ones there...They are looking out the window and see the party in progress with DOZENS OF PEOPLE!! How inane is that? See this one at your own risk. Poor Doris!! .

Angus T. Cat I saw this movie on TV when I was young, about ten or eleven. I thought then it was funny and adult in the sense of being a bit dirty and knowing. I saw it again yesterday. I am now between thirty and death too. "The Tunnel of Love" is a time capsule, but a bemusing one. The humour is degrading to the female characters, especially the wife trying to get pregnant, the constantly pregnant wife next door, and the adoption agency investigator who is immediately judged by her looks. I felt with the investigator when she complained to the husband that Gig Young's character made a pass at her five minutes after meeting her. Almost as bad as the nudge nudge pinch pinch attitude of the neighbor and his advice that his happily married friend should bag a babe is the total lack of common sense in the characters' actions. Why does the insulted investigator drive back to make her own pass at the husband? Why does the husband conclude that he has fathered the investigator's baby when it turns out that she is married? (And before this is revealed at the end, the audience and the husband haven't got a clue that the investigator has a husband herself.)Why does the husband give her a check for a thousand dollars without asking her more questions- like how he can be be so certain that he's the one who got her pregnant? Why is the wife next door constantly getting "off to the races" if the husband's sole contribution to parenthood is telling their kids to shut up before he ships them off to boarding school? If you're fascinated by 50s attitudes toward sex, "The Tunnel of Love" is a revealing portrait of the sort of humour that the artist character might highlight in a cartoon to sell to Playboy or one of the more downmarket men's magazines of the era. Behind the winking and the flirting of the actress in the party scene there's a stream of melancholy, especially in the story of the West Point student in his second year whose family has decided that he will marry his pregnant girlfriend: as Gig Young snaps, he'll have bars on his shoulders and a toddler in his lap. All those martinis and double whiskies and Young's box of tranquilizers that he pops like popcorn point at the terror and sadness behind the whoopie. The husband's dinner with the investigator says it all: he has a bottle of ale and a lamb chop from the children's menu. All of the characters are children themselves. Thank God times have changed.

sludgehound Just had to add my ditto to prior comments. Maybe as a historical peek. My reason for bothering. As entertainment, zero value. As bad time capsule is about all. Catch all the 'clever' way past McCarthy era chatter about "you mean we might be investigated" over the adoption setup. Or "double think" line. So hip. Not. Seemed not worthy of colorizing. Just annoying as hell. Stay in CT and out of the old Village. But of course today's Greenwich Village takes a 1958 Westport income at the very least. UNIVAC, where art tho? Poor rich stressed out commuter. Shoulda stayed in Village and become a Pop Artist over time. Cute chick social worker tho. Not so with the sad MM player.