MartinHafer "My Dear Secretary" is an odd film, as the first and last portions of the film vary so much in quality. The first is brisk and funny--the second is very slow and completely different. It's too bad because if the film could have maintained its pace, it would be an excellent and enjoyable picture. Instead, it's just frustrating to watch.The film begins with Laraine Day being hired as a secretary to a successful writer. She's excited by this but her excitement soon wanes as she sees that her new employer (Kirk Douglas) is a very immature and undisciplined guy. Again and again, instead of working on his book, he takes the secretary and his friend (Keenan Wynn) out gambling and on spur of the moment vacations! Despite this portion of the film being hard to believe, it was quite funny--particularly for Wynn, who provided wonderful support. However, completely out of the blue, Day (who is rather conservative) marries Douglas--a wedding that makes absolutely no sense at all. And, as if the unlikelihood of the pairing also threw the writer, the film just languished and stopped being funny. Instead, the marriage soon begins to fizzle and Douglas' attempt to write his next great novel seems to be a bust. There's more to it than this--including Day becoming a great writer herself and a divorce--but none of it made much sense or kept my interest.Rarely have I seen such an uneven film. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did and can say it's, at best, just an amiable time-passer and nothing more.

sddavis63 The stars of this movie are supposed to be Kirk Douglas and Laraine Day, but it's worth saying right off the top that the movie is worth watching primarily for Keenan Wynn's hilarious performance as Ronnie Hastings. He really is the one who makes this movie.Ronnie is a neighbour of and assistant to author Owen Waterbury (Douglas.) After writing a best-seller, Waterbury gives a lecture to a writing class and meets Stephanie Gaylord (Day.) Waterbury offers Gaylord a job as his secretary, and she accepts, but what she didn't know is that Waterbury's secretaries don't last very long. He's a bit of a playboy type, and he and Hastings always insist on a certain "type" of secretary (ie, extremely cute) and most of them don't take very kindly to being hit on as soon as they walk through the door.Basically, this movie deals with the evolution of the relationship between Waterbury and Day. Both play their parts very well, but, as I said, the show is stolen by Wynn right from the beginning, and it all leads up to an ending (again with Wynn as the comedic centrepiece) that I didn't see coming, particularly given what seemed to be Ronnie's taste in women.All in all, it's good, clean entertaining comedy, with a plot that admittedly gets a little bit tired by the end, but still there's quite a few laughs here. 7/10

junk-monkey I'm starting to wonder, after reading some of the opinions here, if I watched the same film as the other reviewers but after checking my facts I am forced to the sad conclusion that I have.This witless wannabee screwball comedy has to be one of the the longest 94 minutes I have spent, and one of the most unfunny things I have seen, for ages. Now don't get me wrong, I love screwball comedies, but this boring, set-bound drivel falls so far short of the dizzy heights of Preston Sturges and Howards Hawks that it doesn't deserve (to mix my metaphors) to be thought of in the same breath as those greats. Writer / Director Charles Martin's dialogue is neither witty, subtle or interesting - and there's so much of it. He doesn't know how to end a scene either, with some ruthless cutting, especially of people exiting rooms and saying goodbye to each other, the pace of film would have been lifted and then the fact that the limited number of characters are doing stupid and motiveless things for no other reason than this is supposed to be a comedy would have been a little less obvious. Characters in this movie fall in and out of love with each other, and move in and out of apartments, at a moment's notice only to move what little plot there is forward. One moment people are desperately yearning for one person, the next they are getting married to someone else - having wooed and been wooed off screen so we know nothing about it until one of the characters tells us - "Oh, they're getting married!" (usually after someone has made a faux-pas or jumped to the wrong conclusion). If we had known that these two characters were in love or supposed to be engaged before hand we, the audience, might have enjoyed the experience of watching someone making a fool of themselves in front of them. As it is the characters just come over looking like selfish, petulant idiots and we have no sympathy for any of them.The sets are limited and the action confined to them in a way that makes the whole thing look like a badly filmed stage play. The only moments of relief from the tedium are Keenan Wynn who looks like he has wandered in from a different movie and has decided to hang around and be slightly funnier than all the unfunny stuff going on around him.Highly avoidable.

Snow Leopard Reasonable light entertainment in itself, "My Dear Secretary" gets a boost from Keenan Wynn, who in his supporting role makes a habit of stealing his scenes from the stars. The story is not especially new, but it's good enough to hold your attention. Co-stars Michael Douglas and Laraine Day do a solid job and work well together, although some of the material does not quite suit Douglas's style.Douglas plays an eccentric and rather wayward writer, whose approach to things leads to the frequent need for a new secretary. The story starts with him and Day, as his latest employee, getting involved in a turbulent relationship with numerous ups and downs. Wynn, as the writer's friend and assistant, and Irene Ryan ('Granny' from "The Beverly Hillbillies"), as the maid, have the enjoyable task of observing and commenting upon the writer's troubled professional life and love life. The two of them, and especially Wynn, get many of the movie's best moments. Wynn shows his knack here for making a character outrageous yet still believable.The story works all right for the most part, and it fortunately stops before the whole premise runs out of steam. The more madcap parts are the sequences that work the best. Several of the actresses who play the writer's other secretaries give very efficient characterizations in smaller roles, and these help some of those scenes to work especially well. Helen Walker gets some good opportunities, appearing in several scenes as a previous secretary.All the comings and goings create an overall effect of upbeat chaos that sets a good mood for the movie as a whole. Overall, it's not particularly memorable, but it's an entertaining way to spend and hour and a half.