All In A Night's Work (1961) Somehow, after all the 1960's movies I've viewed in my lifetime, I never did get around to seeing this until yesterday......streaming it off of Hoopla.
The poster, though, always stuck in my memory......how could it not, featuring Shirley MacLaine running around draped only in towel.
It's such a slight fluffy little rom-com......you could almost picture the whole thing floating off like a soap bubble before popping altogether.
Three writers labored on this frantic, over-plotted farce and between the three of them, they couldn't come up with even a single memorable gag line.....
Functioning as sort of a big-business satire (a la the previous year's giant hit, Billy Wilder's "The Apartment", once again we have MacClaine as a vulnerable, manic pixie office drone. But in this film, she's been promoted from elevator operator up to research department assistant.
Her Florida vacation, a slapstick comedy of errors, left her with an expensive fur coat and that towel-only mad dash through the room of an elderly CEO who'd just died in his sleep. The dead codger, naturally, was the founder of the magazine publishing company she works for......
Shirley returns to work with the dead magnate's playboy nephew (Dean Martin) now the new CEO ..... and he and his corporate board think Shirley canoodled with their late boss and plans to blackmail them with that revelation. (Please, please, don't ask me to detail the laborious plot machinations required to set up this situation....I'm beggin' ya....)
More complications arise as Dean variously stalks, harasses and/or romances Shirley, who's trying in vain to impress the stuffy, rich parents of her fiance (Cliff Robertson, taking on the most worthless, thankless role you can have in a rom-com - the guy who ain't gettin' the girl....ever....)
All ends well after Dean and Shirley engage in the expected bout of slapstick....which involves Shirley chased all around Dean's expansive bachelor pad.....(set up much like Rock Hudson's girl-trap in "Pillow Talk")
Some funny lines would have really helped here.....but if you love the two stars in their prime, "All In A Night's Work" goes down easy.....Dean's smooth and suave, Shirley's the definitive kooky girl next door and the film also benefits from its solid cast of familiar character actors....(Gale Gordon, Jack Weston, Richard Deacon, Mary Treen and others...)
And it doesn't hurt that Andre Previn delivers a insistent, exuberant rom-com score that sounds like it was written for a film way better (and funnier) than this one. So if you love the whole era and its stars, there's a whole lot worse ways to kill 92 minutes....2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
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