That Touch of Mink (1962)

Sadly Over-hyped

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Doris Day and Cary Grant were my parents favorites as well as mine. To see That Touch Of Mink in 2018 is a bit of a cringing exercise. Two mega stars in their, let's say, mature years, specially Grant, behaving like adolescents it's a bit hard to take. Doris's character shares an apartment with Audrey Meadows - who I believe also needs some professional attention - they sleep in little twin beds. So bizarre to see. But and here is were the Doris Day mystery resides. I believed her unbelievable character, one hundred per cent. Doris Day was 39, Cary Grant 58 but everything I saw in Doris Days was true. That's why, I presume, this is a favorite comedy of the Coen brothers. My niece, who is 15, saw the film with me and her comment was that Cary Grant's and Gig Young's characters should be arrested. Yes, 2018 is not 1962 and films are socio-historical documents.

I can't say I've ever been a fan of the bedroom-farce genre from the 50s/60s. So Doris Day is back as the 40 year old virgin and instead of Rock Hudson as the man who falls for her virginal charms we get CARY GRANT!!!! So we have an aging pushing 40 Doris Day still play the virgin saving herself for marriage whose character is supposed to be around 21 and a very aged Cary Grant play a millionaire who wants to bed her.Okay so that's basically the movie. The only laughs I got were from the supporting cast, notably John Astin and Gig Young. But if we were to think that the two leads who at the time literally could/would have been GRANDPARENTS at their ages, it just seems too stupid and silly to see them having such sexual hang ups. A 40 y/o virgin in Doris Day will not get the guy by holding out. The 60 y/o millionaire would have moved right along to a much younger woman since he was only trying to do her a favor in the first place by trying to deflower what is probably a near menopausal wilting flower by that time.I will never understand why Doris Day wanted to keep her virginal image when she is/was pushing middle age. The camera lens was clouded in her up close moments to hide her age. It was kind of funny, but it wasn't intentional.I did make it through, but it was annoying and for the most part unfunny.

A screwball-inflected US chick-flick pits a blonde bombshell Doris Day against a dapper Cary Grant, under the helm of the Oscar-winner director Delbert Mann. Day plays an NYC career woman Cathy Timberlake, embarks on a seesaw with a wealthy middle-aged man-about-town Philip Shayne (Grant), in their romantic entanglement which the man (naturally) wants to keep it casual but the woman (also naturally and morally correctly) doesn't want to relinquish her virginity before marriage. The meet-cute premise is blank beggar belief (the chauffeur of his Rolls Royce must be a sterling matchmaker), but magnificently, the film deploys pleasurable set pieces (whether it is a rash or under the influence of liquor) to sabotage Philip's advances and countervails the frivolousness with Cathy's oscillation, she is endowed with the dream of every wide-eyed bachelorette, courted by a minted knight in shining armor, only in her case, not for marriage but dalliance, and that is her conundrum.So, it goes without saying that the cut-the-Gordian-knot solution is to tie the knot, but for an incorrigible bachelor like Philip, Cathy, the destined ultimate victor, needs an operative ploy to jolt him into the action, which is, she pretends to go with another suitor (the unassuming John Astin) to a motel, to make Philip jealous, to make him fight for her, a golden rule to all the girls in the same fix: you must prove yourself to be desirable first and foremost, other virtues can wait afterwards. The dialogue is snappy and chirpily facetious as expected, Audrey Meadows is one sterling one- liner thrower as Cathy's roommate-and-best-friend Connie and Gig Young emerges as a repartee- prone right-handed man of Philip, blithely wallows in the gay innuendo, a light-hearted running gag. The two leads, both are too long-in-the-tooth for their characters nevertheless, are a charming match, Day, oozes with pizazz in her jauntiness and comic rhythm, whereas a genial Grant takes an essentially patronizing role with his de rigueur panache, a job only a bankable matinée idol can excel at. In the main, THAT TOUCH OF MINK is a good-natured, tongue-in-the-cheek rom-com, completely at ease with its fine amalgamation of cartoony decorousness and appealing retro-flair, no frippery, no particular insight neither.

. . . could be a line from a slasher flick, but the only horror here is a mysterious epidemic of "rashes." This puzzling aspect of THAT TOUCH OF MINK begins with Doris Day's "Miss Timberlake" character claiming to be "inhibited." But later--wink, wink--a joke is made about not Day's touch of mink, but the touch of her frequent on-screen fluids swapper, Real Life STD victim Rock Hudson. In between, her heartbreaking herpes outbreak halfway into TOUCH delays her baby until the final scene, immediately after tycoon Phil's own touch of herpes. TOUCH could have been the first movie titled FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, as the avuncular Cary Grant goes cradle-robbing with his graying temples, adorned mostly in gray suits. Miss Timberlake says at one point that she wishes that he had hit her, and Phil tells a guy from Detroit that he HAS punched her out. Add 40 years to "Christian Grey's" age and a Red Room, and SHADES becomes a remake of TOUCH.