TAKE HER, SHE'S MINE (1963)

It’s a little painful to watch middle-aged Hollywood vets trying to stay in touch with the fast-changing youth-culture of the ‘60s. Even when they did manage to briefly pull even with the ins-and-outs of the cultural/ sexual/social Zeitgeist, by the time the film came out, it’d all look hopelessly square & dated. Take this adaptation of a hit B’way play by Henry & Phoebe Ephron. On stage, Art Carney, Phyllis Thaxter, Elizabeth Ashley & Richard Jordan put it across by laughing over Dad as he faced a Kennedy-esque New Frontier agenda, making adjustments as his not-so-little girl took off for college and modern womanhood (sex, social protests, the coffeehouse folk scene).* Two years on, Nunnally Johnson’s script ‘opens it up’ for James Stewart, Audrey Meadows, Sandra Dee & Philippe Forquet (who he?) with extra adventures and a new Paris-based third act. Everybody tries hard to make the generational clashes non-idiotic (Stewart in particular tones down his broad comic playing of the period), but it remains faintly embarrassing anyway. The main tactic is to have over-protective Dad rush to the rescue at the first sign of female libido or rebellion. (On a positive note, he does share a single bed with Meadows. Progress!) One neatly developed scene (from the play?) has Stewart join a freedom of speech ‘sit-in’ even while disagreeing with the speech in question; and it’s fun seeing Bob Denver as a laid-back folk singer. But the film only takes something approaching true comic flight in a studio backlot Paris when a magnificently funny Robert Morley comes on as a father with his own parental issues, and then proceeds to demonstrate exactly how to play these things. Working on a different level of inspired lunacy (did he write his own cuckoo dialogue?), even Henry Koster’s staid direction can’t keep him down. It’s only a turn, but a delicious one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Opening a week before President Kennedy’s assassination, the film never had a chance to find an audience before it disappeared.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The play’s two daughters presumably inspired by real-life Ephrons, Nora & Delia.

DOUBLE-BILL: Dee, who shares top-billing with Stewart, played coming-of-age types for nearly a decade. Few of her films have aged well, but Vincente Minnelli’s piss-elegant THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE/’58 and Douglas Sirk’s astonishing IMITATION OF LIFE/’59 show a surprising range she never followed up on.