QUICK BEFORE IT MELTS (1965)

Oliver (Robert Morse) is a reporter for Sage Magazine, whose slogan is The Magazine that Thinks for You. He's dating Sharon, the boss’s daughter. When his boss sends him to Antarctica to embed himself with the workers at a research station, he tries to get Sharon to sleep with him, but she steadfastly refuses to have sex before marriage. His companion on the trip is photographer Pete (George Maharis) who is a gregarious playboy whom we first see being tossed out of a car by an angry woman fed up with his behavior. Despite their different personalities, they bond quickly when they meet before heading to New Zealand, both promising to forget about women for the duration, which is just as well as the admiral in charge of the South Pole operations (James Gregory) hates women. But the plan falls apart when Oliver falls for a half-Maori woman named Tiare (Anjanette Comer) and Pete falls for Diana Grenville-Wells (Janine Grey), the first woman with a hyphen in her name that he's ever met. At the South Pole, they soon acclimate to their surroundings: -50 degrees temperatures, a penguin who delivers messages round the camp, a seal who needs to have its temperature taken. They meet Mickey (Michael Constantine), a friendly Russian scientist, and our boys agree that getting him to defect could be the story that would make them well known. Meanwhile, starved for female attention, Oliver and Pete talk the admiral into bringing in a planeload of women as a publicity stunt, and of course, they make sure that Tiare and Diana are on that plane. Complications, some of a slapstick sort, ensue.

Though this is based on a novel, the whole thing feels like the creators just dumped a bunch of comedic and/or satiric situations together in a blender and hoped for the best. At times it's entertaining, mostly due to the actors, but the narrative is loose and baggy, and I just couldn't bring myself to care much about the characters and their outcomes. Maharis is top-billed and he's handsome and, depending how you feel about playboy types, charming, but Morse is more central to the story—this was a couple of years before HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS would make him (briefly) a leading man, so Maharis has slightly more cachet, thus first billing, and also seems more comfortable on screen. They work surprisingly well together and are fun to watch. The other performances that work well come from James Gregory (Inspector Luger on Barney Miller) as the hard-assed military man, Bernard Fox as a friendlier military man, Michael Constantine as the Russian, and Yvonne (Batgirl) Craig as Sharon. Comer, who went on to a long if undistinguished career, doesn’t really make much of an impression as the exotic Tiare. Norman Fell plays a rival reporter and the craggy-faced Howard St. John is amusing as Morse's boss. There is some second-unit location shooting involved here, but the actors almost certainly never left the studio, which is OK. There's an absurd but amusing bar fight scene, and of course, the penguin (who the men call Milton Fox because, well, that's his name!) steals all his scenes. Best line: when the boss calls his daughter and Morse answers, the boss asks what he’s doing there. Morse replies, "Trying to seduce your daughter," to which the boss wishes him luck. Mildly funny, but not recommended to folks who aren't already fans of 1960s sex farces. Pictured are Morse and Maharis. [DVD]