Myriam Nys One of the better Doris Day-comedies, well-made and enjoyable. It contains quite a few good scenes, such as the disastrous first commercial or the domestic crisis involving giant amounts of soap suds. There are a few possible inconsistencies here and there, such as the fact that a lady gets pregnant at an age where most women have gone through menopause, but still, these things happen. However, I was far from charmed by the underlying message with regard to women. Beverly Boyer (the character played by Doris Day) is very much like one of these miniature ballerina dolls on top of music boxes, who dance for a few minutes and then disappear. She has her little moment in the sun and then it's back to a life of housewifely duties and suburban gentility, mainly because her husband can't cope with the idea (horror of horrors !) that he might have to wait ten minutes before getting dinner. Or else - my hand trembles as I type this - he might come home and discover that his martini was improperly chilled !One does not need to be called Joanna Russ in order to realize there's a lot of contempt towards women hidden here. In case you doubt this, feel free to watch the scene where the said lady of mature years is about to give birth to her child inside a car. Beverly Boyer, a woman who has given birth herself, can console and assist her, but it is the male obstetrician who delivers the child, after riding to the rescue like a knight in shining armour. Aaah, poor silly women, they try their best - but when things get real, it's only a man who can save the day... For clarity's sake, I'm not attacking male obstetricians, doctors or gynecologists - everyone who undertakes long and difficult studies in order to perform a responsible and socially useful job deserves the utmost respect. What I do dislike, is the idea that only males could or should become obstetricians, doctors or gynecologists, with females spending their time on preparing little lobster cocktails for posh dinner parties. I also object to the idea that women are complete ninnies who know bupkas about deliveries or first aid. You might object that I'm looking at an older movie with the eyes of someone living in 2018. This is true, of course, but there is something mean-spirited and dismissive about the movie's intent which must have felt unpleasant even half a century ago.

Dalbert Pringle Filmed in living color, The Thrill Of It All is a very dumb, contrived and, generally, a very, very unfunny movie "Sit-Com" from 1963.This naive suburban/family-life story tries with all of its ever-loving might to be adorably cute and highly sophisticated both at the same time. And, unfortunately, it falls flat on its face on both counts, big time.Actress Doris Day is particularly annoying (as usual) as the suburban housewife who suddenly gets her 15 minutes of fame when she becomes the national advertising spokeswoman for "Happy Soap" products.There are definitely much better Comedies from the 1960s out there. I'd certainly pass on this preposterous nonsense if I were you.

VirginiaK_NYC The period right before the sexual revolution of the 60s seems to have produced some movies with an astonishing degree of hatred of women as themes, almost as if America's collective unconscious knew that women were about to take charge of their lives and had to put up a fight. This is one of them. Even though she is provided with a really lovely wardrobe (oddly - or not - at least half the items in it are in the lingerie category -- things you wear only inside the house), Doris Day here plays the infantilized chattel of her handsome, boorish doctor husband, James Garner.She's offered a job as a spokeslady for a soap company looking for a wholesome image, and when she starts to enjoy it, her husband does everything he can to ruin things for her and mess with her head. This is nothing like the sparring of previous eras, among pairs of people like Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, and whoever they were dealing with. Here Doris Day is sweet, sincere, and childish -- she can't figure out what $1500 a week would amount to for a year!! -- her husband holds all the power, clearly needs to give her permission to do things, and is not above psychopathy. These games are no fun when only one player has any adult power.

MBunge I can't imagine there's a much better example than this film of how amazingly marvelous Doris Day could be. I'd enjoy watching her reupholster a sofa.Beverly Boyer (Doris Day) is a happy if somewhat harried housewife. She's married to pediatrician Gerald Boyer (James Garner), has two rambunctious children (Brian Nash and Kym Karath, who couldn't have been more stereotypically "funny" movie kids if they'd had laugh tracks surgically implanted in them), bottles her own ketchup and is generally satisfied with her life. When Gerald helps a middle-aged couple conceive, he and Beverly are invited to a party where they meet the middle-aged couple's loud and crotchety father (Reginald Owen). He owns a company that manufactures Happy Soap and is so charmed by Beverly, he hires her to do a TV commercial for the product. The public falls in love with Beverly's awkward honestly and her career as a product spokeswoman takes off like a rocket. That career takes her out of just being a "doctor's wife", with hilarious complications (and I'm not using the world hilarious sarcastically). His wife's success doesn't sit all that well with Gerald, however, and he comes up with a plan to get Beverly knocked up so she has to quit working. The movie concludes with the middle-aged couple having their baby in trying circumstances and the incident pushing Beverly and Gerald to resolve their contentious struggle.I'm not sure there's any way to overstate how wonderful Doris Day is in this movie. For the first three-fourths of the film she is the center of the story and is tremendously funny and appealing. Even when other aspects of the film feel a little contrived and phony (like her movie kids who always have something "funny" to say), Day always appears natural, real and believable as wife, mother and budding TV pitchlady. In this film, Day shows us the essence of the movie star. You just want to keep watching her, independent of whether the rest of the movie is good or not.Which isn't to say the rest of The Thrill of It All isn't good. It's light hearted and a bit slapsticky, but it's well-written and fast moving. Some of the comedy gags are a bit over the top but most are right on target. The rest of the cast can't match Day, of course, but they're all good in their own right. There's a mischievous edge to most of the script, as though Carl Reiner understood how touchy the subject matter of this story could be in 1963 and had fun seeing how much humor he could wring out of it.Now, the last quarter of the movie does focus more on Gerald Boyer and it sort of grinds along until its overly melodramatic conclusion. James Garner does well, but while Gerald may have been a vaguely sympathetic character in 1963…by today's standards he's pretty much a sexist pig. That the movie largely condones his selfish concern about his wife being there for him can be a bit grating and the things he does to Beverly to try and get her to quit her career are just downright mean.Those minor quibbles don't detract from the first three-quarters of The Thrill of It All being about as much fun as any movie I've ever seen.