It's a Great Feeling continually slips outside itself to snicker at its own process of manipulation, with the two male leads playing “themselves” (that is to say, spoofing their screen personas: Jack Carson, the unregenerate rat, and Dennis Morgan, for reasons known only to himself Carson's best friend); cameo spots by famous stars (including Gary Cooper, Sydney Greenstreet, the ever-present Ronald Reagan, and Joan Crawford doing the best impersonation yet of Joan Crawford); and appearances by Hollywood directors King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, and David Butler (all of whom have, incidentally, directed films on Hollywood - and Butler, of course, directs this film), Into this open spoof enters a “fictional” character, one Judy Adams (Doris Day). Hers is the classic hick-come-to-Hollywood saga found so often in early Hollywood-on-Hollywood comedies, and her story is one in which the “real life” stars become involved. This effectively moves the film into the realm of screen fiction. But just when we imagine ourselves in the safe territory of untruth to which we are used, the “real” identity of Jeffrey Bushdinkel, Judy's sweetheart in Gerky's Corners, Wisconsin, is revealed, and It's a Great Feeling becomes what it has been all along: just another Hollywood prank.
It wasn't the first film to be, as it were, beside itself with satire, nor was it the cleverest (for unmitigated zaniness in the category of film reflexivity, Hellzapoppin takes the award). But It's a Great Feeling, made in 1949 Technicolor, with both studio and stars at its disposal, was probably the last of its particular kind of great feeling. (JB)