The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)

Film: The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)

Stars: Doris Day, Rod Taylor, Arthur Godfrey, John McGiver, Paul Lynde, Dom DeLuise, Dick Martin

Director: Frank Tashlin

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Doris Day: click here to learn more about Ms. Day (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Doris Day's film career ended pretty quickly after she stopped being persistently bankable, which is not the case for most leading actors (where they get at least 5-7 years of grace period before Hollywood quits on them entirely, albeit they do so in lesser and lesser parts).  The Glass Bottom Boat in 1966 was her final major hit (keeping her in the Top 10 most bankable stars in Hollywood despite being a woman of 44, a death knell age at the time), and she would only make movies for another two years.  We're going to talk about this below, but the back half of Day's career, when she would move away from film, was rough, and involved quite a few scandals for the girl who, more than any actress of her generation, inhabited the "girl next door" motif, and many of them involved the men in her life, one of whom was her husband Marty Melcher, a film producer who was one of the producers on The Glass Bottom Boat.

(Spoilers Ahead) Before we get into that, though, we're going to talk about The Glass Bottom Boat, which features Day as widow Jennifer Nelson who spends her time split between helping her dad's tourism company (where she dons mermaid apparel and swims underneath the titular glass bottom boat), and working at an aerospace company in public relations.  There she meets her boss Bruce Templeton (Taylor), whom she already fought with when he hooks the bottom half of her mermaid outfit during her routine in the film's opening scene.  The two start up a friendship, and it's clear that he has access to important government secrets.  While Bruce is falling in love with Jennifer, the rest of the men in the company (including comedians Paul Lynde, Dom DeLuise, & Dick Martin) go about trying to prove that Jennifer is a spy.  They find out that she's not, but instead it's another man posing as a CIA official who is the spy, but Jennifer & Bruce stop him, and end up getting married, driving off in a boat that they quickly crash.

Your patience with The Glass Bottom Boat will depend on two things: how much you like late-1960's slapstick comedy (which is very similar to the sitcom-y style you also would've found on television) and with Day as a performer.  Day is too old to be playing such an idiot this far into her career, and it makes sense that she was starting to become a punchline to audiences at the time.  In a similar fashion to John Wayne (who weirdly never made a movie with Doris Day, and should've as I honestly think they would've been great onscreen together), audiences were tired of the "World's Oldest Virgin" routine and while there was still a market for her (again, much like Wayne), her star power was feeling strong but one-note in 1966.  I liked The Glass Bottom Boat because I've found this month that I'm a sucker for Doris Day even in bad movies (I was already a fan, this solidified it for me, and I plan on seeing more of her as I can), but I will admit it's not a particularly good movie, and doesn't take enough advantage of the strong cast of comedians it has at its disposal until the final thirty minutes of the picture.

As I said above, Day's career ended soon after this.  Her film Caprice was a high-profile flop, and while With Six You Get Eggroll was a hit, it wasn't enough to keep her wanting to make movies, and it would be her final picture.  What soon happened, though, were two major scandals.  The first involved her husband Marty Melcher, who died of an enlarged heart in 1968 at the age of 52.  Melcher had embezzled all of the fortune that Day had made in the previous two decades for her film & music work, and had contracted her to a television show, which she had to do as she was now broke.  She sued Melcher's business partner and got some of her money back, and her television show was a hit that ran for five seasons, but she never made another movie.

Day also had her name in the paper due to her son Terry's association with the Manson Family (you read that right-America's Sweetheart had a direct connection to the most notorious murders of the 1960's).  This is a story that could take up a whole other article, but Melcher had regularly visited the Manson Family at Spahn Ranch, and had lived at one point (with his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen) in the house that Sharon Tate was murdered in (testimony from the Manson Family indicates they knew that Melcher didn't live there anymore, but that they wanted to send a message to him that he might be next).   All of this took a toll on Day, who would largely retreat from the spotlight, only occasionally doing television, despite entreaties to come back to movies (including most famously her refusal to play the Anne Bancroft role in The Graduate), and toward the end of her life, refusals toward the AFI, Kennedy Center, & the Oscars to accept career achievement awards they wanted to bestow on her.  She deemed that to be part of her past life as a movie star, and indeed that was a long time gone when she died in 2019 at the age of 97.

Next month we're going to spend time with one more movie queen of the 1950's & 60's who would take on the title of America's Sweetheart alongside Doris Day & Audrey Hepburn, an actress who, like Day, struggled to get the critical respect she wanted during her lifetime (and again like Day, had a husband she shouldn't have let handle her finances).