Tashlin's treatise on “the difference between us and our British cousins” doesn't offer many insights into the British temperament, but it says a lot about us. Terry-Thomas plays a visiting professor of anthropology at a California university, an umbrella-carrying Englishman in sunny Malibu. It seems that anglophilia runs deep among American women, much to the proper professor's discomfiture; when Tuesday Weld prances into his apartment in her tiny shorts, our hero mistakes his future stepdaughter for yet another amorous co-ed, leading to some squeamish situations. The pleasure here is less in the farcical plot than in the numerous tossed-off gags lampooning American excess, including the excess of the CinemaScope frame—the sequence of a dachshund dragging a giant dinosaur bone along the beach is “one of the most dynamic studies in montage this side of Sergei Eisenstein” (Dave Kehr, New York Times). Even the fadeouts are in color.
—Juliet Clark