I wouldn't have thought it possible for a film with a cast like this to be so unfunny, and director J. Lee Thompson not surprisingly never made another comedy again (unless you count 'The Greek Tycoon'). It was reckless to invite comparisons with the likes of 'The Kid Brother' and 'Horse Feathers' by ending with a slapstick football match, and the lawsuit against the film brought by Notre Dame is the one authentically hilarious thing about this turkey.
Peter Ustinov tearing about on his golf scooter anticipates the less amusing moments from 'The Monkees' and 'The Banana Splits' (with appropriately clunking musical accompaniment by the overrated 'Johnny' Williams); while his character is a depressing harbinger of all those comedy foreigners he would later play in lousy films over the next quarter of a century.
Despite having recently scripted the greatest Clouseau film of them all, 'A Shot in the Dark' (1964), William Peter Blatty truly laid an egg with this tasteless mishmash of leering sex farce and Cold War satire published by him as a novel in 1963. His script contrives to namedrop the likes of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Marlowe but is nothing like as clever as it seems to think it is, and has something to offend everyone.
Since it was produced by her own husband Steve Parker, Shirley MacLaine presumably must shoulder some of the blame of making a film so archaically politically incorrect. One of its few saving graces, however, is that it hails from the days before she began taking herself very seriously and was still quite charmingly unaffected (witness the gutsy way she belts out the absurd title song); although much of the time she bizarrely seems to be still wearing the pancake makeup she wore in 'My Geisha'.
Peter Ustinov tearing about on his golf scooter anticipates the less amusing moments from 'The Monkees' and 'The Banana Splits' (with appropriately clunking musical accompaniment by the overrated 'Johnny' Williams); while his character is a depressing harbinger of all those comedy foreigners he would later play in lousy films over the next quarter of a century.
Despite having recently scripted the greatest Clouseau film of them all, 'A Shot in the Dark' (1964), William Peter Blatty truly laid an egg with this tasteless mishmash of leering sex farce and Cold War satire published by him as a novel in 1963. His script contrives to namedrop the likes of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Marlowe but is nothing like as clever as it seems to think it is, and has something to offend everyone.
Since it was produced by her own husband Steve Parker, Shirley MacLaine presumably must shoulder some of the blame of making a film so archaically politically incorrect. One of its few saving graces, however, is that it hails from the days before she began taking herself very seriously and was still quite charmingly unaffected (witness the gutsy way she belts out the absurd title song); although much of the time she bizarrely seems to be still wearing the pancake makeup she wore in 'My Geisha'.