There’s an inspired silliness to the Technicolor bon bon “Walk Don’t Run,” the final film in Cary Grant’s legendary Hollywood career.
Surely a mere screenwriter — TV veteran (“Bewitched”) Sol Saks in this case — can’t have been the one to dream up tis all by his lonesome. The mere logistics of the picture hint that somebody or somebodies a lot higher up at Columbia Pictures had to be involved even before the pitch. There’s a bit of a “brain trust” feel to it.
Studios were remaking intellectual properties that they own the rights long before the phrase “intellectual property” was born. Columbia Pictures filmed and released the 1943 classic “The More the Merrier,” a rom-com where two-guys-and-a-woman are thrown together in a WWII housing shortage, with the older man matchmaking for the younger two. IThat story was always ripe for remaking.
But doing it in the more overtly sexy 1960s, setting it during the housing crunch at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics? Shooting sequences during those Olympics? Folding in the silliest track and field event of the games, the butt-twitching 50 km Race Walk?
Mocking British prudery, American provincialism, Soviet paranoia, apologetic Japanese manners and the cute culture shock of modern Westerners exposed to modern Japan, and ancient Japanese customs, mores and cuisine was merely a collection of clever finishing touches.
And trotting out Grant one last time, not destined to “get the girl,” but fit and over 60 and showing off comic timing polished during the Golden Age of Screwball Comedies is the cherry on top of it all. That was just the right level of “cute” and “quaint” this featherweight comedy needed. A very funny man lifts an amusing conceit into something that actually plays.
Grant is Sir William Rutland, an impatient industrialist who shows up at his regular Tokyo hotel, but not at the reserved time.
“Two days early” one clerk, then another and then a manager apologize, each bowing as they do. “OLYMPIC, you know,” they repeat, one after the other after the other. “Very sorry!”
Pinched for a place to stay, Rutland hits up the British embassy, gets the brush-off from a functionary with the too-too-British name Julius D. Haversack (John Standing), but then he finds an offer the share an apartment on the embassy’s bulletin board.
Next thing we know, he’s chauffered to this tiny upstairs flat with several tiny rooms and opaque paper walls. Next thing she knows, our young room-renter (Samantha Eggar, fun) is utterly buffaloed into letting him rent and stay there. With her.
One running gag begins. She simply can’t have this. Well, she needs the cash. So long as they leave “seperately.” So long as they have an understanding.
“You’re married?” she’s shocked/relieved to learn.
“Why not? I’m old enough!”
A second running gag, he drops this detail on his wife, by long-distance, and repeats it to business folk that he meets about this arrangement with “a young lady…a very attractive young lady.”
Everybody asks, “Relative?” As if Cary Grant didn’t have a shot.
Jim Hutton plays a long, lanky architect who has qualified for the Olympics in a sport he dares not mention by name. He, too, showed up early. He, too, has no place to stay.
Rutland makes the mistake of taking an interest in him — “You remind me of myself a few years ago. Well, quite a few years ago.”
We’re treated to the spectacle of the younger man buffaloing the older one into letting him share his “half” of the already crowded flat.
Christine may be engaged, to a stuffy fellow Brit — guess who? But all the brusque Yank and too-proper Brit need to make their love connection is Cary Cupid.
Grant is a delight all the way through this — scrambling up a (soundstage) gutter to get back into the apartment after he’s locked out, turning up unshaven, befuddled and annoyed, even stripping to his boxers and T-shirt to join in the Olympic 50 km Race-Walk to try and finish the (matchmaking) job in the film’s most famous scene.
One-liners are repeated as characters switch places, Hutton’s Steve Davis cracking “You remind me of myself a few years from now,” Grant’s Rutland turning Christine’s “I don’t think I LIKE tricky people” on Steve when the roles are reversed.
The picture’s a bit slow by modern standards. All this stuff about “bathroom scheduling” bogs down the opening act, and there’s a little too much of Rutland’s ongoing effort to distract Christine’s fiance so that Steve can make time with her.
But cute scene follows cute scene, many of them throwing “foreigners” into what had to seem exotic to audiences not that far removed from World War II — a bustling, modern Japan, a taste of Japanese dining out here, a visit to a public bathhouse there.
A WWII joke lands, the Russian Olympic Team’s easily fooled KGB man (Ben Astar) doesn’t. George Takei plays a Tokyo policeman trying to get to the bottom of Russian suspicions.
By this stage of his career, Grant had legions of comic impressionists joking about his suave accent, exaggerated phrasing and always-worth-a-laugh TIME-ing. He doesn’t make every line funny, but he gives it the Old Hollywood try. And that’s enough, in this case.
Director Charles Walters also helmed “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” He didn’t take the right lessons from his best comedy, “Lili” (1953). It’s a half hour shorter than these later efforts, and pace is paramount in comedy, even when the comedy’s Columbia’s intellectual property.
Rating: TV-PG, innuendo
Cast: Cary Grant, Samantha Eggar, Jim Hutton, and George Takei.
Credits: Directed by Charles Walters, scripted by Sol Saks, loosely based on the script to “The More the Merrier,” by Frank Ross and Robert Russell. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi.
Running time: 1:53
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