I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Excellent but underrated film

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is a fantastic movie! I had heard of the title, and had it on my list of must-gets, even though I had never actually watched it before. I finally picked it up for $1.00 in a charity shop. This is exactly the kind of picture that I enjoy; a great cast in a romantic comedy, with lots of laugh-out-loud antics thrown in. I was surprised at how good Rod Taylor is in this. He's not my favourite actor, but he and Doris have great chemistry in this movie, and they are ably assisted by the likes of Paul Lynde, Dom DeLuise, Edward Andrews, John McGiver, and Dick Martin thrown in for good measure. With those names on the bill you already know that you're in for a heck of a treat, but this picture goes above and beyond! There's slapstick galore throughout, and it's almost as though Frank Tashlin said "Now, Doris and Rod, you say your lines, and these other guys are just going to do their thing and you just go with it, and I'm going to keep rolling, o.k.?" I mean, I know that there was a script, but it just feels as though sometimes they threw it away!! The movie is fast-paced, witty, sometimes predictable, but always wonderfully entertaining. Paul Lynde is such a crack-up that you can imagine the whole cast and crew falling about in hysterics many times over while filming this. There are also several appearances by the familiar face of Alice Pearce who plays her usual nosey neighbour character, as she does in many of Doris's movies. I love this picture, and it is now one of my favourites!! I think you will like it too. It's a great movie for the whole family from a time when Hollywood made great pictures! Pity they don't make good stuff like this now! 10/10.

MASTER PLAN: steal the new gravity formula. This would appear to be another in a long line of films spoofing the James Bond spy craze of the sixties, specifying the female perspective ("Modesty Blaise"; "Fathom"), but is more like just another in a long line of successful Doris Day comedies. Ms. Day was usually partnered with the likes of Rock Hudson or James Garner, leading men specializing in light comedy. In this case, her partner is Rod Taylor, who had just starred as "The Liquidator" the year before. Here, he's a very successful aeronautics engineer who has just invented a new formula for duplicating gravity while one flits about in outer space. Naturally, enemy agents would love to get their hands on this formula. Day's character, a widow, divides her time between a tour guide job at NASA, taking college courses and helping her dad by pretending to be a mermaid whenever he conducts one of his sightseeing tours from his glass bottom boat (hence, the title; yet, this boat plays no part in the plot except in the very beginning of the movie). Her dad is played by then-famous TV/Radio personality Godfrey, who didn't really star in films until then. Taylor accidentally snags Day when he goes fishing and she becomes bottomless, quite a suggestive scenario for those days, especially in Day comedies. Day continues her adorably furious posturing, setting up the requisite sexual tension between the two leads.The two leads slowly but surely hook up, in standard sappy, if silly, romance clichés, despite Day's preposterous predilection for clumsiness - she's a walking disaster area, very similar to some female characters in a couple of Matt Helm films and even the Bond films themselves. Taylor's character represents modern technology and progress; he's one of those guys who will be responsible for all of us getting around in flying cars at some point in the future. There are a few amusing scenes in Taylor's very modern house, where he shows off some gadgets to Day in his kitchen; I suppose it's a sad comment on how far we've progressed in the past 40 years that some of these still look very advanced. The whole spy angle really kicks in during the last third, during Taylor's house party, when all his compatriots are convinced that Day is a foreign spy. Seems she's been making weird phone calls to some guy named Vladimir and running off some numbers. Of course, the audience knows who Vladimir really is and this sets up the characters proceeding on a false assumption, which we get to snicker at. There's also the matter of who the real spy is. We've seen this before, many times, but the actors make it entertaining; Lynde is goofy as the head of security and Dick Martin is especially funny as Taylor's buddy. Dom DeLuise shows up in an early role, playing off of Day in some crude slapstick; he's better in his last scenes. Day & Taylor make a pretty good match, breezing through the romantic stuff. It's also interesting to see actor Fleming, who had just finished his long-running role on TV's "Rawhide" and died soon after this in a drowning mishap. Heroine:7 Villain:7 Male Fatales:7 Henchmen:5 Fights:4 Stunts/Chases:6 Gadgets:6 Auto:6 Locations:6 Pace:6 overall:6

This picture wasn't thought to be much when it was released. Most people thought it was a silly sitcom style comedy not up to Day's earlier romantic comedies. Arthur Godfrey gave it some air play on his daytime radio show, with Day and Taylor as guests, but there wasn't much else as I remember. By this point in his career Godfrey had lost his star lustre of just ten years before and his network radio show on CBS was just about all that was left, so his appearance in a major Hollywood movie was a big deal for him.The picture did get a Music Hall premiere run in New York, but as I say, most people just yawned.Seen forty years later it has a lot going for it, especially compared to today's cinema "comedies": good writing, expert direction, good pacing and editing, colorful location shots of Catalina and vicinity, good playing by the leads, who look to be having fun, and really good support from that amazing cast of 60s character actors.There is a surprising amount of frank sexuality in this picture for the time, without nudity or profanity (Doris' character is a widow so she plays her as sexually mature and sophisticated), Godfrey's character has a wife/girlfriend about whom he's absolutely crazy and shows it, often (!), and there's even a surprising gay subplot that's played for laughs of course, but not offensively so. There's even Paul Lynde in drag...priceless! Forty years later, it still makes me laugh. You will too.

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.