DON'T MAKE WAVES (1967)

A drifter named Carlo (Tony Curtis), who has all his possessions in his car, parks along a coastal hillside California road to admire the view and sees Laura (Claudia Cardinale), a beautiful young artist, throwing a fit about her ruined painting. When she gets in her car and pulls out onto the road, she accidentally drags Carlo's car out as well. It goes rolling down the road, eventually crashing in front of Laura's car and catching fire. Laura takes him back to her Malibu apartment to search for her insurance papers but she can't find them so she invites him to stay the night on her fold-out couch. In the night, Carlo is awakened by a knock at the door from Rod (Robert Webber), Laura's "patron” (in her words) and owner of a swimming pool company. He's married but because his wife is a sickly invalid, he can't get a divorce. Carlo and Laura try to explain their situation, but when Rod says he believes them, Laura gets pissed off that he believes such a crazy story. Carlo agrees to sleep on the beach overnight, and the next morning, he awakens in the midst of a bunch of surfers and beach bums. A gorgeous young woman who goes by the name Malibu (Sharon Tate), a skydiver who spends most of her beach time bouncing on a trampoline, saves Carlo from drowning. Carlo immediately falls for her, though she already has a boyfriend, a sweet but dumb muscle hunk named Harry (David Draper). All the main characters have been introduced, although later we meet Rod's wife Diane (Joanna Barnes) who is most definitely not a sickly invalid, and from here the movie takes off into total craziness and I found events difficult to follow. But at heart, this is an old-school screwball comedy and despite many crossed connections, everyone (quite improbably) winds up happy at the end.

Critical response to this movie is split between those who love it (including, oddly, Leonard Maltin who gives it three stars) and those who hate it. My feelings aren't strong enough to be called love or hate—it's more that I tolerated it enough to stick with it to the end. My problem is that it moves so quickly from one utterly unbelievable situation to the next that it was hard to follow with any precision. At one point, a character played by Mort Sahl basically gives Carlo a hillside house and a fancy car, and I never quite figured out why. Carlo, blackmailing Rod with the knowledge about his healthy wife, gets a job as a pool salesman for Rod and one of the more coherent scenes involves Carlo selling a pool to Jim Backus and his wife, playing themselves. Backus breaks into his Mr. Magoo voice for Carlo, saying, "Friends love me at parties!" It helps that the actors throw themselves into the material with straight faces, even though I suspect that some of them had no more idea what was going on than I did. Tony Curtis, at the center of the movie's madness, is actually the weak link, seeming to be particularly at sea, but he is surrounded by strong supporting players. Cardinale, speaking in a thick accent that I found hard to decipher sometimes, mostly busies herself by being in constant motion, and Tate does the opposite, looking bored. But Webber and Barnes manage to feel like real characters, as does Draper, who in real life was a famous bodybuilder who was Mr. Universe at the time of filming. Perhaps he's not acting at all, but he at least seems natural amongst all the artificial folks around him. Edgar Bergen has a droll cameo as a horoscope writer who goes by the pen name Madame Lavinia and who reiterates the advice of a chiropractor friend of Harry's that "sex steals away strength like a thief in the night." The finale, which involves the slow destruction of the hillside house in a mudslide, is fun and impressively pulled off. At one point in my notes, I wrote, "This was made by Martians who had no idea how Earthlings behave." Another thing that put me off is the huge amount of post-dubbing of dialogue which frequently acts as a distancing device for me. The natural sound scenes are so few that they stand out. A novelty for sure, annoying at times but watchable. Pictured are Draper and Tate. [TCM]