Take Her, She's Mine (1963) Maybe fate took a hand when this movie opened a few weeks before the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination.......
We suppose we could pontificate about how that day permanently ended America's era of innocence.......... and how "Take Her, She's Mine", a gasping, hoary 1950's relic posing as a 1960's film was a perfect example of a conservative, comforting American mindset that would never recover from 11/22/63........
Not that JFK's death and the national chaos that followed stopped the flow of dumb, hopelessly out of touch Hollywood comedies........
Those movies still rolled off the studio assembly lines. (And the Dream Factory's attempts to deal with the baby boom generation's growing distrust and disillusion with once sacred, respected institutions (like government, military and parental control) were embarrassing and lame.
"Take Her, She's Mine" already looked 20 years out of date when it stumbled into theaters in 1963.
The play it was taken from, by screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, was based on the couple's humorous anxieties over the supposed college escapades of their daughter Nora. (Yes, that Nora Ephron, of "You've Got Mail", "Sleepless In Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally"..)
The film clumsily traffic-managed by 20th Century Fox's in-house mediocrity Henry Koster, presents the stuttering, sputtering James Stewart as an exasperated dad coping the antics of his cutie-patootie college freshman daughter (Sandra Dee).
In a desperate bid for cheap meta laughs, Stewart's character is also plagued by people who mistake him for that.....er....film star fellow....Jimmy Stewart. Later on, he grimaces when his wife (Audrey Meadows) suggests 'Que Sera, Sera' (whatever will be, will be) as a way to deal with Dee's rocky romances and minor arrests at protest rallies.
Having heard Doris Day warble that song into the ground during "The Man Who Knew Too Much", Jimmy instead opts for full helicopter parenting........hopping on to planes every time he thinks Dee has fallen into the throes of beatniks, French Gigalos, and literary groundbreakers like author Henry Miller......
(This movie thinks it's the height of hilarity to show Stewart up all night, riveted by "Tropic Of Cancer", as if discovering the idea of unbridled sex for pleasure for the first time.....
The story than conspires to have the hapless dad either arrested and/or publicly humiliated as a campus protest sit-in, a French whore house, and a riverboat costume party cruising down the Seine. (Oh right, did we forget to mention that right after Dee's kicked out of college, she nails a scholarship to study art in France? That's Hollywood suburbia, folks.....)
We shouldn't even need to tell you that none of this stuff is even remotely funny....or bears any resemblance to any actual father-daughter relationships in real life. It's simply lousy 1950's TV situation comedy gags spiffed up in CinemaScope and Color By Deluxe.......
(Some sequences here, we have to admit, are priceless.......including the parade of howling, horny college boys rolling through Sandra Dee's all-girl college.......and Dee's painful attempts at the kind of rousing folk songs that permeated the country in the early 60's....check out our recent post on 'Ring A Ding Rhythm'..)
And if you read our 5/7/20 post on MGM's 1968 "The Impossible Years", you'll know that continued upheavals of the 1960's did nothing to improve or smarten up the generation-gap comedies that the Hollywood cranked out.
Viewed again 57 years after its release, we did smile a bit at "Take Her She's Mine".....the same way we'd smile at a Natural History Museum diorama of prehistoric life.........("Wow, did we really live like that?") And there's some fun to be had spotting beloved character actors like John McGiver and Robert Morley.....and even a young Bob Denver (of "Dobie Gillis" and "Gilligan's Island") as, what else, a beatnik.......
For entertainment value, though, this one's mainly for us tireless curators of the glossy, glitzy and foolishly goofy 60's cinema. 1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)
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