Glass Bottom Boat (1966)

Doris Day is warm and sunny. She bakes pies. Her home is painted in bright colors accented with early-American crafts and artifacts. Rod Taylor is a ladies’ man astronaut/inventor with a gadgety space age swingers pad. He keeps the secret plans for GIZMO locked in his voice-activated safe under the Buddha. If ever characters could be summed up by their decorator homes, this is it!

After starring with Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, Doris Day rode the wave of a comeback career, spoofing the wholesome image she’d created in earlier roles by becoming the “world’s oldest virgin” in stylish yet breazy comedies of the sexes. Men chase the women to wear down their resistance, and they just might have got away if it weren’t for these darn high heels…!

In Glass Bottom Boat Doris Day is 42 and older than her hunky co-star Rod Taylor, yet somehow this only adds to her naive appeal. Too often director Frank Tashlin wants to go for slapstick physicality, but the film is brightest when playing off Day’s domestic sensibilities, like when she cremates a cake in Taylor’s futuristic radiation oven, or casually eats a peanut off the carpet while cleaning it.

The film strings together a dozen or more kooky set-ups, starting with Day in a mermaid costume snagged on Taylor’s fishing line, to him pretending to need a biographer and hiring her as his secretary. It’s only a matter of time before she is mistaken for a Russian spy, GIZMO is stolen, Paul Lynn (as an overzealous security officer) dresses in drag to follow her into the ladies’ room, and Dom DeLuise swallows a transistor microphone disguised as an hors-d’oeuvres.