And here's a truly oddball bit of flotsam from the era......yet another in the tidal wave of secret agent spoofs that engulfed the world in the wake of the Bond films.....this one starring no less than America's premier Girl-Next-Door Icon, Doris Day......almost at the tail end of her long, beloved film career....
'Caprice' was yet another of the many substandard, slapped together studio movies Day found herself forced into by her rapacious husband and manager, Martin Melcher. While steering her away from roles like Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate", Melcher plundered and exhausted Day's fortune while arranging for her to star in rickety, out-of-date comedies that looked like ancient relics, unearthed from decades gone by......
A tireless performer, Day soldiered on, to her everlasting credit, in whatever stale concoction Melcher threw her into.......and though probably twenty years too old to cavort in pseudo-Bondian fluff like "Caprice", she's still the permanently adorable starlet, giving it her all, looking stunning in bizarre, trendy pop art clothing.....and even establishing a romantic chemistry with her most unlikely of leading men, intense young Richard Harris, courting Doris while quoting 'Hamlet' at her....
Like the Rock Hudson/Claudia Cardinale vehicle "Blindfold", which we covered in a previous post, "Caprice" whipsaws back and forth between slapstick farce, tongue-in-cheek faux-Bond,antics, and a few occasional, semi-serious action sequences. But unlike the clunky direction of "Blindfold', the film benefits greatly from the fast, light touch of farce-master Frank Tashlin. What better movie to give to a guy who started out directing Warner Brothers cartoons that a 60's spy spoof ......which is essentially a live action cartoon.
Tashlin colorfully zips the plot along.......with Day and Harris as squabbling rival spies in an industrial espionage war between rival cosmetics companies......yes, folks, not quite the fate of the world hangs in the balance here.....but a desperate race to secure a water-repellent hairspray....(or as Doris herself tartly remarks, "I'm the spy who came in from the cold cream...") It does turn out that there's a little more at stake than meets the eye, but in a movie like this, nobody's ever going to remember the MacGuffins the spies are after....
Some surprising bonuses along the way: An opening ski chase that could have easily fit into "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and a ski-off-the-mountain stunt that somewhat resembles the classic opening of "The Spy Who Loved Me".......and talk about meta before its time - Doris spying on a fashion model while taking in a showing of...."Caprice" with Doris Day and Richard Harris...(you can even hear her singing the 'title' song, which isn't heard in the movie's actual main titles).....the sequence abruptly ends when Doris gets groped by the model's creepy boyfriend (that "Bonnie And Clyde" babyface, Michael J. Pollard).....lastly, a little twinge of nostalgia as we bid farewell to one of the last films shot in 20th Century Fox Cinemascope, with the accompanying logo and triumphant fanfare.....
We'll admit it.......strange and uneven as it is, we hold a warm spot in our heart for "Caprice" a movie that could only come to exist from the intersection of so many disparate elements.....the spy spoof craze, Martin Melcher's overwhelming greed, the newly exploding movie career of Richard Harris and constant professional good sportsmanship of Doris Day......that's why we're not likely to see anything like it again......for Agent Doris, we'll secretly pass out 3 stars (***).......realizing it's too late to deny or disavow all knowledge of our actions..........
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