Kiss Them for Me Reviews

If someone had told me that a Stanley Donen movie starring Cary Grant was an absolute bore, an anemic, leering, unfunny stage-bound mess of a film that featured two vacuous leading ladies, I’d have given them a most quizzical look. But that film very much exists and it is called Kiss Them for Me.

The story, as much as there is one, concerns three sailors on leave, an icy socialite and pneumatic blonde having a party in a hotel room. Will they get in trouble for skipping out on the PR-approved appointments and photo-ops that the Navy had set up for them? Who really cares? At 105 minutes, the film feels interminably longer than that for a variety of reasons – watering down the material. The main reasons are the two lead actress that Grant is forced to try and act opposite of.

Jayne Mansfield, a poor man’s ditzy blonde, may have the body built for sin and the peroxided hair, but she’s missing the spark that made previous bombshells like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe so immortal. Harlow had the duality of either being a tough-talking pistol who knew just how to seduce men to make them do her bidding, or good-girl who was only having fun at playing bad. Monroe may have become infamous and iconic for playing bubble-headed sex bombs, but lurking beneath that breathy voiced surface was a true artist aching to prove her worth. The variations and textures she could bring to the model, and that she was smart enough to escape when it wore thin, were part of her charm.

Mansfield has none of that. Nor does she possess even the tiniest bit of Harlow or Monroe’s gift for physical or verbal comedy. She plays everything as a giggle and jiggle, and not much more. Her presence here is more a special effect than as an actual character or actress. Knowing that Judy Holliday originated this role on Broadway only makes one wish that she had been allowed to recreate it. Her kewpie doll voice, tomboy act and ability to infuse gravitas into even the most airheaded of characters seems like the perfect combination for this role (watch her sublime work in Born Yesterday to see what I mean).

Worse yet is Suzy Parker, who they’re clearly trying to refashion as the next Lauren Bacall. The problem here is that Bacall had a weight and allure as an actress without having to say or do anything to provoke our interest. Her mystique helped her keep up with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not even when her acting is a little green. Parker is lovely to look at, but Grant’s mega-watt star power and charisma swallows her whole and she’s a dead zone on celluloid.

I’ve long said that Cary Grant never slummed, even when the material was beneath him. Kiss Them for Me was the type of film, and performance, that I was talking about. At 52, and only a few years away from retirement, he could have done this part half-asleep and backwards. Instead, he invests more gravitas into sequences that don’t really deserve it, and try as he might to spin comedic gold out of this muck, he can only be so successful on his own. I’ll chalk the failure of this one up to Donen’s brief period of growing pains and readjustment after his fallout from Gene Kelly and remember that some of his best work was only a few years away.