Julie (1956)

Talk about having a bad day! Air hostess Julie has just discovered her homicidal second husband sneaked aboard the plane. First he tried to crash their car on the winding California highway, then he admitted he murdered her first husband! When she tried to get away he shot her best friend. Now he’s killed the pilot and wounded the co-pilot, and with some encouragement from the tower Julie’s the only one who can land the plane!

This is why Pan-Am made their stewardesses stay single.
…more about Julie

That Touch of Mink (1962)

Doris Day at the height of her come-back popularity as the prim but lovable “girl” who won’t put out without a ring on her finger, meets her match in playboy executive Cary Grant who is willing to fly her around the world but doesn’t want to settle down and get married. What’s a good girl to do?

He’s charming, wonderful, and wealthy. He showers her with gifts and shopping trips to Bergdorf’s, but a girl who strays with her reputation always pays. Can an old fashioned girl be bought for a trip to Bermuda and a mink coat? Mmmmmaybe…

It’s actually never implied that Day is inexperienced with men. The joke of her being the world’s oldest virgin is a sexist slur, a label Day hated because it flippantly denied any positive aspect to her wholesome sex comedies. The real trophy at stake isn’t her virtue but her value. Easily won is easily discarded — it takes a woman of experience to know how men think, and to hold out for what she wants.

Far from being a prudish throwback in an age of carefree swingers, Day forges her own brand of lipstick feminism: the right to wear skirts and high heels and still insist that men respect you in the morning, no matter what your age or experience.
…more about That Touch of Mink

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.