The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)

No, it's not a porno film, just a silly, fun, experience, headed by Doris Day and Rod Taylor. Much slapstick is included in this breezy farce. The screenplay has Rod head of a division in a NASA research facility on Catalina Island. CA. Nearby, Doris's acting father, Arthur Godfrey, runs a glass bottom boat for tourists to get a better look at life in the shallows. Doris is a new guide for tourists at the aerospace facility. Rod's present main project is to find a way to overcome the problem of weightlessness in space. Doris gets a taste of this research when she walks through the wrong door. Next, we see her floating around in the air. ....In his conversation with Doris about his research, he mentions a new(phony) project, with the goal of getting to Venus, which he invites her to participate in. Naturally, he calls it Project Venus, which, of course, could refer to Doris, as well, as he is much taken by this gorgeous, vivacious, widow, who has no children. ......Actually, the two got off to a bad start when Rod was fishing and Doris dove into adjacent waters. The fishing line hooked Doris's bottom piece and somehow pulled it off as Rod reeled his line in, thinking he had a big fish. We didn't see how she got out of this predicament! Use your imagination. Periodically, Rod would do or say something that ticked Doris off, and this sometimes romantic relationship would sour for a time...... Doris got her one high heel stuck in a grating, with Rod nearby. He grabbed her leg, trying to pull the shoe out. She got mad, and ran off with just one shoe on. Eventually, Rod got the shoe out, and chased her down......Doris experienced the wonders of a high tech kitchen at the space center , including a popup egg beater. The most interesting gadget was a robotic vacuum cleaner, with a hose that acted rather like an elephant's trunk, getting up close and personal with Doris. ......One of the funniest scenes is when an electrician is on a ladder and leans to his left, putting his foot on an adjacent table, right in the middle of Doris's banana cream cake, which she had made for Ron. Doris makes things worse when she brings a tall skinny trash receptacle to put the cake remains in. Somehow, the electrician manages to get his foot stuck in this, and a little later Doris also gets her foot stuck in it.....In the last half, the frequency of slapstick decreases, as more attention is paid to the developing romance, and to the fantasy promoted by some that Doris is a Russian spy. This fantasy is fueled by the fact that her dog is named Vladimir, whom some assume is her Russian contact. One snooper overhears her say that last night, she slept with Vladimir, and assumes the worst. To me, the spy-hunting portion is less interesting than the early part, but you may differ........ Doris gets to sing a bit, dueting with Godfrey, playing his ukulele, to the rousing "The Glass Bottom Boat", with some interesting lyrics. Also, a brief rendition of her hit "Que, Sera, Sera". Later, she sings the dreamy "Soft as the Starlight", while alone under the stars. See it at YouTube.

"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.

It takes more than a great Hollywood star with a telescope, singing about the stars in the sky, to coerce most viewers into increasing the star rating they would award for a particular film. Here there is little else to encourage them to do this, although the Director Frank Tashlin worked hard and fortunately the film does have a few other fairly catchy lyrics its viewers may enjoy enough to increase the rating that they give it. But apart from this, its assessment is largely a matter of how much the viewer concerned enjoys pure physical slapstick comedy of the old fashioned type. Those viewers who do so the most usually seem to award it quite a high rating, but today there are too many who are not slapstick fans. I could watch almost any ten minute extract from this film enjoying the high tech slapstick with which it is replete, but watching it any longer quickly leads to increasing boredom as there is really no story or human interest to back up the visual pyrotechnics.Satire is a word Hollywood seems not to understand, but the basic story, of important and secret space research projects being conducted by NASA, would lend itself admirably to the type of satirical treatment which might have created a really worthwhile film. If the scriptwriter had abandoned his first draft and studied the works of Swift, Ibsen, Wilde, or even Shaw, he might even have provided MGM with the script for quite a memorable film - it is interesting to speculate whether or not it would ever have been filmed. As it is both the script and the resulting film are extremely so-so, and in my view this film has never justified its release as a DVD. I am sorry about this because some of the camera work was first rate, but although the potential was really there, I can only give it an IMDb rating of three stars.

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.