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Memorable, crazy movie

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

"The Glass Bottom Boat" offers what, in the mid-1960s, was a powerhouse cast. Some of the stars are still remembered today. Dick Martin and Dom DeLuise, for instance; and Paul Lynde, whose presence was guaranteed to brighten up any dull movie.Some stars have, over the years, lost their lustre. Arthur Godfrey's, for instance. The comedy team Bob & Ray once poked fun at Arthur Godfrey by saying he seemed to be on every station all day long. Godfrey was an early form of Dick Clark. A television pioneer, he was probably most famous during his day for "Talent Scouts," though his credits at the time were numerous.Eric Fleming also has flowed through the fingers like the sands of time. It was Fleming and not Clint Eastwood who was the top-billed star of the then-popular show "Rawhide." Whether Fleming would have gone on to any sort of movie career is unknown since he drowned the same year "Glass Bottom Boat" was released.John McGiver and Edward Andrews are also welcome faces to movie buffs. Though probably most famous for appearances in "Sixteen Candles" and "Gremlins" Andrews had a long and industrious career as a supporting actor.What of the real stars, who are meant to carry the movie? Doris Day is Doris Day. Her acting range was minimal but she was all right if you liked that sort of thing. Her biggest selling point was her singing but, apart from the title song, she has little opportunity to exert her lungs. Though the DVD shows her in some sort of exotic dancing outfit, she's only in it for a few seconds of screen time.As for Rod Taylor, despite anchoring several well-known features (including "Separate Tables" and George Pal's "The Time Machine"), I've always found him an actor lacking in charisma. Early on in "GBB" he has his shirt off. I suppose beef-cake is his biggest selling point. To me, his best acting job was the voice work he did in Disney's animated "101 Dalmations." The Glass Bottom Boat itself has little screen time. This is not a movie about oceanography, though that might have made it interesting. It's a movie about space. In the 1960s, space was the big thing, and everyone from Gregory Peck ("Marooned") to Don Knotts ("the Reluctant Astronaut") were making pictures about astronauts.The movie seems to be about some aspect of the space program, with spies trying to get their hands on some gismo or the other. The actual plot hardly matters. It's just an excuse to let grown people run around like children. And not-too-bright children, at that. I had just turned five when this movie came out, and I didn't want to see it. My parents and brother went, but I protested and spend a lovely evening with my grandmother instead. Viewing it at last as an adult, I believe I made the right decision.The best thing that can be said about "The Glass Bottom Boat" is that it is innocuous, with some very funny stuff interspersed in all the other goings-on.

It takes more than a great Hollywood star with a telescope, singing about the stars in the sky, to coerce most viewers into increasing the star rating they would award for a particular film. Here there is little else to encourage them to do this, although the Director Frank Tashlin worked hard and fortunately the film does have a few other fairly catchy lyrics its viewers may enjoy enough to increase the rating that they give it. But apart from this, its assessment is largely a matter of how much the viewer concerned enjoys pure physical slapstick comedy of the old fashioned type. Those viewers who do so the most usually seem to award it quite a high rating, but today there are too many who are not slapstick fans. I could watch almost any ten minute extract from this film enjoying the high tech slapstick with which it is replete, but watching it any longer quickly leads to increasing boredom as there is really no story or human interest to back up the visual pyrotechnics.Satire is a word Hollywood seems not to understand, but the basic story, of important and secret space research projects being conducted by NASA, would lend itself admirably to the type of satirical treatment which might have created a really worthwhile film. If the scriptwriter had abandoned his first draft and studied the works of Swift, Ibsen, Wilde, or even Shaw, he might even have provided MGM with the script for quite a memorable film - it is interesting to speculate whether or not it would ever have been filmed. As it is both the script and the resulting film are extremely so-so, and in my view this film has never justified its release as a DVD. I am sorry about this because some of the camera work was first rate, but although the potential was really there, I can only give it an IMDb rating of three stars.

I saw this film when I was ten years old, during its initial release. A typical family night out at the movies. For some reason this otherwise ephemeral event has stayed with me as a freeze frame of the more pleasant, uncomplicated memories of that era.I bought the DVD after not seeing the film since that long ago 1966 night--incidentally, I vividly recall the huge waves of laughter from the audience during several scenes; anyone who dismisses this film as a fiasco or whatever obviously didn't experience a very happy crowd seeking some light entertainment. On seeing the DVD, I was impressed by the sharp editing (I'm an editor--believe me, the timing of various sight gags etc. are very well done), creative use of colors and consistently high level of comedic performances. The naysayers who have posted otherwise don't know from squat. Overall, a totally innocuous movie that has retained a nice reputation as a still enjoyable memento of the mid-'6os.

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.