| With Rock Hudson in Lover Come Back. |
Looking back over Doris's films of that decade, the sudden drop in quality is astonishing. In the first half of the 1960s, she made the aforementioned classic, That Touch of Mink, The Thrill of It All, Move Over Darling, and Send Me No Flowers. All five films are entertaining comedies that pair Doris with charming leading men (e.g., Cary Grant, James Garner, and Rock Hudson) capable of generating their own laughs.
That's a stark contrast to the rest of the 1960s, in which Doris followed Do Not Disturb with The Glass Bottom Boat (which has some decent laughs) and then subpar pictures like The Ballad of Josie, Caprice, Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, and With Six You Get Eggroll. By the end of the decade, she had retired from the movies and moved on to television. (Several books blame Doris's then-husband and manager Martin Melcher for committing her to these less-than-stellar pictures.)
| Janet (Doris Day) and Mike (Rod Taylor) get lost (note the unimpressive rear screen). |
| Janet with the handsome antiques dealer (Sergio Fantoni) |
But let's get back to Do Not Disturb, which stars Doris and Rod Taylor as Janet and Mike Harper, Americans who have moved to Great Britain so he can work for a wool clothing company. The Harpers are a dysfunctional couple: he wants to live in an apartment close to work, so she buys a house in the English countryside without his consent. He spends more time with his younger, attractive secretary than with his wife. She suspects him of having an affair with his secretary; he suspects her of having an affair with a French antiques dealer. There's a lot of mistrust in this marriage--but, after several lame misunderstandings, it all ends happily.
| Janet mistakes a fox for a dog. |
Along the way, Doris's character saves a fox from hunters, plays soccer in the Parisian streets with children, gets drunk on wine, and is mistaken for her husband's mistress at a "business convention." The only time she appears to be having fun is when she's frolicking in Paris--without her husband. And that is the fatal flaw with Do Not Disturb: this couple rarely seems happy together...when they are together. They're just not a likable pair and that's saying a lot when one of them is played by Doris Day.
The lack of production values boggles the mind. Poor rear-screen shots combine with stagy sets to create the Harpers' country estate and the streets of Paris. Even the instantly forgettable title song, warbled by Doris, sounds off-key.
My advice to you is not to make the same mistake I did. When a movie's title is Do Not Disturb, heed the advice and don't bother with it!