This late Doris Day effort is a truly awful film ,a fact which is initially disguised by an excellently filmed pre-credits sequence in which a skier in white is chased down mountainous slopes by a sinister black-clad skier wearing a reflective visor and toting a high-powered rifle. Much of this sequence, and a second that appears near the end of the film, is shot with a hand-held camera. In fact it looks as if the cameraman was skiing down the mountain himself as he took the footage. It's a terrific piece of filming that immediately immerses the viewer in the action but after this superlative opening and a cleverly designed credits sequence, the film falls flat with a resounding thud.
Doris Day was about 42-years-old when she made this flick and, thanks to some ill-conceived make-up and atrociously synthetic looking wigs, she looks every day of those 42 years. Already at least fifteen years too old for the part, she's made to wear the type of outfits that shouldn't be seen on a woman over twenty-five, and doesn't look like she's having a good time at all. It's a shame, because she was still a good-looking woman at the time, as can be seen in WITH SIX YOU GET EGG ROLL, which she made the following year. No wonder she doesn't like to talk about this film anymore.
Her co-star is Richard Harris, who is also woefully miscast as a light leading man. Whoever convinced Harris he was suited to comedy roles was either inept or pandering to Harris's ego. Either way, all concerned made a big mistake when he signed up for this film. There's no chemistry whatsoever between him and Day, they never look like people who would be attracted to each other, and the manner in which their relationship develops is both poorly conceived and ineptly handled.
Director Frank Tashlin's career was in irreversible decline when he made this film (which can have only accelerated the slide) and he made only one more feature after this. He manages a couple of decent scenes, but the light touch he brought to a number of minor classics in the fifties just isn't there anymore. To be fair, the script doesn't give him much to work with for a comedy it is remarkably unfunny and the unnecessarily convoluted plot doesn't seem to know where it is going before eventually descending into absurdity, which is a shame because it contains the nugget of a good idea. Day didn't like this one, Harris didn't like it and, in all probability, neither will you.
