This film has to be one of the very best romantic comedies ever made. It works well on so many levels and leaves the viewer with a good feeling at the end. I remember seeing it numerous times when it was released in the year 1960. This is a real feel-good movie, made in a more innocent time before the antiwar protests and campus revolts which characterized the latter years of that decade. This movie stays with you long after you see it. It was just released on DVD, 47 years after it came out. I have always had fond and wonderful memories of this film. Watching it tonight just before sitting down to write this review was like seeing an old friend whom you haven't seen for decades. All those warm feelings and fond remembrances just came flooding right back and it's like you're 10 years old again. The storyline is simple and straightforward. TONY CURTIS plays David Wilson, an assistant professor of chemistry at Columbia University. His wife Ann(JANET LEIGH) decides to surprise him by dropping in unexpectedly and catches him in a liplock with a female co-ed who initiated it. She runs out, jumps in a cab and angrily announces that she's divorcing him and he'll be out of their apartment that evening. Panic-stricken, David calls his old friend Mike Haney(DEAN MARTIN), a mystery writer for the CBS television network. David pleads with him to come up with a good excuse that he could use with Ann to explain away what happened. Over tall drinks of 90-proof chemistry lab hootch, Mike comes up with an explanation- and it's a doozy. He tells David that he was kissing her in the performance of his duty- as an undercover agent for the FBI! David thinks that Mike is nuts and tells him that Ann would never buy such a ridiculous tale. But Mike convinces him that it would work and takes him to the prop department at CBS where he orders up an authentic looking FBI identification card and a police revolver that ostensibly will be used on his show. They confront Ann at the apartment that evening and go through a whole routine to convince her that her hubby is a G-man. Skeptical at first, she winds up buying it after seeing the card and the gun. A comedy of errors ensues when the FBI gets involved after the props are not used on the show and when DEAN MARTIN decides to capitalize on the situation by suckering David into going on a double-date with two platinum blonde bombshells played by BARBARA NICHOLS and JOI LANSING, all in the line of duty, of course. David and Ann wind up on the six o'clock news when Ann goes to the Chinese restaurant with a real FBI Agent(JAMES WHITMORE) to give David "his" gun which he forgot to take with him. Misinterpreting what she overhears in the powder room, Ann thinks the two blondes plan on killing her husband and Mike! She attempts to stop them at gunpoint and in the ensuing struggle for the revolver, the gun goes off and Agent Powell takes a bullet in the arm. David is rendered unconscious by a flowerpot falling off a window ledge that lands on his head. A mobile television news crew arrives and Ann, cradling her unconscious husband in her arms, tells the reporter that he works for the FBI and the two blondes are enemy agents! The next day the newspapers have blaring headlines about FBI undercover agents capturing Soviet spies in Times Square! The plot thickens when government wiretaps reveal that actual Russian agents want to get their hands on David because he knows the names of fellow scientists at Columbia University who are conducting research on germ warfare and radioactivity. Posing as FBI Agents, the Russians(LARRY STORCH and SIMON OAKLAND) sucker David, Ann and Mike to the Empire State Building for a photo shoot by the Bureau's Public Relations Division. The FBI sets up a stakeout but the Russians succeed in isolating the trio in an elevator and administering sodium pentothal to make David talk while using chloroform on Ann. This is one of the funniest sequences in the film. David doesn't reveal anything and STORCH tells him if he doesn't cooperate, they'll take his wife and put her on a submarine and he'll never see her again! When the Russians realize that the pentothal is starting to wear off and the FBI is hot on their heels, they abandon the three in the building's basement. When his wife regains consciousness, David, still coming off the pentothal, tells her he's going to jail for 180 years because it's against the law to have a fake FBI card. Then he asks her if she'll wait for him! When she asks him about the two platinum blondes, he tells her "They sing and dance- like rabbits." Angered, she runs out of the basement. Mike had been knocked out and when he and David "wake up", David, seeing turn valves, levers and utility pipes, thinks they're on board a Russian submarine! They decide to sink it by opening all the valves and pulling all the levers. As the basement floods with water, it shorts out the building's electrical system, causing the even-numbered floors to boil over and the odd-numbered floors to freeze! The film ends on a happy note as firemen break in to halt the flooding, the Russian spies are captured, and Ann, now knowing the whole truth of what happened, tells her husband, "Come on home, my darling." The last scene is a shot of Manhattan taken from Queens, showing a mushroom cloud of steam rising from the top of the Empire State Building! This is one of my all-time favorites and I give it a 10 out of 10. Don't miss this one. It's an absolute gem!
Review of Who Was That Lady?
