That Touch of Mink (1962)

Director: Delbert Mann

Cast: Cary Grant, Doris Day, Gig Young

Synopsis: A rich businessman and a young woman are attracted to each other, but he only wants an affair while she wants to save her virginity for marriage.

It’s movies like Delbert Mann’s That Touch of Mink that earned Doris Day (By the Light of the Silvery Moon) her reputation as the eternal virgin, which is quite ironic, considering the fact that the film’s presumption that we accept her seal is still intact is the film’s major stumbling point. Day would have been in her mid-to-late 30s when she made That Touch of Mink, so asking us to believe she’s still a chaste virgin – which she is clearly intended to be – is asking just a little too much of anybody watching in these more sexually liberated times. Add to that the fact that Cary Grant (North by Northwest, The Grass is Greener) – who’s presumably standing in for Rock Hudson – is about twenty years older than Day and the whole thing starts to look a little unsavoury.

That Touch of Mink tries to sparkle with a succession of witty lines, and for the first fifteen minutes or so it manages to pull it off. But as the odd couple’s on-again off-again romance winds its tortuous way towards an inevitable conclusion it rapidly loses its lustre. Gig Young (Arena, The Hindenburg) gets the most laughs as Grant’s reluctant sidekick who is riddled with guilt because he gave up a career as an economics professor to become a stock market analyst for our hero and therefore feels he has sold his soul. This, too, quickly grows old as the joke degenerates into Young’s psychoanalyst mistakenly believing his patient is engaged in an homosexual affair with Grant.

(Reviewed 16th February 2012)