Operation Petticoat (1959)

(On TV, July 2021) Even if it had been a terrible film, Operation Petticoat still would have been worth a look if only to see an aging Cary Grant go up against a younger Tony Curtis. Fortunately, it’s not a terrible movie. Far from it — by going back to WW2 submarine movie as an excuse for a silly but rarely absurd comedy featuring women passengers clashing with the crew, it’s a film that goes for four-quadrant appeal (as it existed back then, in-between teen audiences and veterans), good use of Grant and Curtis in their usual personas, and some large-scale physical comedy thanks to director Blake Edwards. Grant plays a captain keen on bringing his damaged submarine back to allied territory, and having to deal with a devious scrounger (Curtis) in order to accomplish his goals. While this keeps everyone busy through the opening half of the film, things take another turn when five nurses board the ship and they try running past the Japanese patrols. If you’ve seen many other WW2 submarine movies, let’s be clear that Operation Petticoat has plenty of new things to show you, whether it’s a torpedo “sinking” a truck, crying newborns being a sonar risk or a submarine painted pink. The presence of female characters in a submarine film is a giveaway that the film won’t be particularly progressive to twenty-first century audiences, but there’s something about Grand and Curtis’s charm that somehow makes it all tolerable. After overdosing on too many similar films in the past few months, I felt some relief in having far more fun than anticipated with Operation Petticoat — it’s quite entertaining, and the Grant/Curtis matchup is only a part of that. (Alas, the picture quality of the version I saw was very disappointing — still, the pink came through well enough.)