"Battle of the Blondes" Round Seven: Betty Grable vs. Doris Day

I went into Round Seven of Battle of the Blondes cautiously optimistic about both of the films I had chosen to watch. I'm not a big fan of either Betty Grable or Doris Day, nor the type of cheery musicals they typically made, but Down Argentine Way, my choice for Grable, sounded like unassuming fun (and was made before she became BETTY GRABLE, owner of the most expensive legs in Hollywood), and my choice for Day, That Touch of Mink, has Day teamed with Cary Grant in one of her trademark romantic comedy roles from the early sixties, complete with expensive outfits and a jet setting storyline. I tend to overestimate how much I'm going to enjoy romantic comedies, both old and new, but after the dreariness that was Brigitte Bardot in A Very Private Affair, I was ready for something a little bit more buoyant.

Fortunately, Down Argentine Way is everything you would hope an early-forties musical comedy would be, without any of the tedium or over-earnestness that can sometimes creep into movies of that kind: it's bright, colorful, and well-paced with entertaining song-and-dance numbers from Grable, The Nicholas Brothers, and especially Carmen Miranda (pictured), making her English-language debut. Grable plays a rich American who travels to Argentina to buy a racehorse and falls in love with the son of a wealthy horse breeder, only to discover that their families have a long-standing rivalry. Don Ameche plays her love interest, and does a nice job playing a native Argentinian without stepping too far into the realm of caricature. The film is thin but entertaining, and it was nice to see Grable in one of her earlier roles, as the only other movie I had seen her in was How to Marry a Millionaire, which came near the end of her career and in which she's good, but definitely the least impressive in a trio that also includes Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe.

Perhaps I would have been better off sticking to one of Doris Day's earlier films roles as well, because while I don't have the strong either-or opinion on her that many classic film fans have, I do tend to prefer her in her pre-1960 roles, before her acting tics took over and she became that persona many people associate with "Doris Day." I thoroughly enjoyed her and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959), but in That Touch of Mink, which came out only three years later, both she Cary Grant seem too old for the roles they're playing: Day is almost forty and looks it, and Grant is 58 and acts it, seeming exhausted and noticeably lacking in his own personal tics and mannerisms, which might have to do with age or might just have to do with the character he's playing, because he's markedly more Cary-Grant-esque in the following year's Charade with Audrey Hepburn. Day is still a beautiful woman, but in playing a character who's constantly described as gorgeous and irresistible to men, she sports a serious case of JBF hair for much of the film and has noticeable crow's feet forming around her eyes. There's nothing wrong with growing -- or looking -- older, but the sixties are notorious as a decade when stars who were past their rom-com prime were still trying to play characters who should have been played by actors ten or twenty years younger.

That Touch of Mink suffers because, like Down Argentine Way, the story is pretty thin, but unlike Way, it doesn't have a lot of spectacle to carry the extra weight -- unless you're satisfied simply by the presence of nice clothes and the combination of Grant and Day, which I wasn't. Day plays an out-of-work woman in New York City who falls for a rich executive played by Grant, only to discover he's interested in a no-strings-attached sort of relationship; it's a wholesome sex comedy, basically, but Grant and Day lack the spark she shares with Hudson in the equally-sly Pillow Talk. (I'll leave it to other people to discuss why Day has more chemistry with a confirmed gay man than a man long-rumored to have been gay.) In Pillow Talk, Day's character isn't afraid of sex so much as she's afraid of sex with her promiscuous neighbor (Hudson), whereas in Mink she breaks out in hives at the mere sight of a bed. Mink is loopy where Pillow Talk is coy, and thus Mink falls victim to the same trap many rom-coms of today fall into: Day's character type is in her late twenties, while she herself is in her late thirties, and yet she's playing the character with all the skittish silliness of a girl in her late teens.

Down Argentine Way: B+

That Touch of Mink: B-