Debbie Reynolds plays a country gal, Tammy, raised on a houseboat next to a river by her moonshinin' pa Walter Brennan. In an early scene, Tammy bemoans the fact that she's never seen her "complete self" in a mirror. Somehow she knows all the tricks to modern makeup however. As I was watching the film, I kept wondering how it would have played if they had actually cast somebody who looked or felt even remotely like a hillbilly. But this film exists in some kind of Pollyanna time warp, its down-home Americanisms pushing skinny Debbie Reynolds into the over-sized and outdated shoes of Mary Pickford where they are unsurprisingly uncomfortable.
Leslie Nielsen's performance is a study in generic male appeal with no real personality. He's a male ingénue and not given much of any chance to do any of the interesting things we now know that he's capable of. The rest of the cast features some pleasing turns from veterans like Brennan and Fay Wray, but the whole enterprise is soaked in mawkish sentiment, a sort of worshipful attitude towards naiveté. Absolutely nothing unpredictable is allowed to happen, and there are few genuine laughs. The film's only redeeming quality, for those not already intoxicated with the talents of Debbie Reynolds, is the colorful set design and costumes which are captured faithfully and unimaginatively by Arthur Arling's photography.
This is basically a movie for people who like TV. If you watched "Wonderful World of Disney" every Sunday night back in the 70s, then you might enjoy this completely vanilla film. The less said about the film's middle section, where Tammy and the rest of the members of the household dress up as Antebellum stereotypes -- including the maid in a red bandanna mammy outfit -- by the far the better. You might find yourself, like me, with your mouth agape that a film so bland and so deliberately inoffensive could actually be so vile. It's not as if the film-makers weren't aware of what they were doing and, "oh it was a different time" -- if that were the case, they would not have put that little scene where Tammy and the maid discuss how distasteful the whole thing is. Tammy could have said something about it and took a stand, but she's not really the heroine that all the characters in the movie make her out to be. She's just another movie naif who we're supposed to adore, for no particular reason except that she's Debbie Reynolds in pigtails.
Leslie Nielsen's performance is a study in generic male appeal with no real personality. He's a male ingénue and not given much of any chance to do any of the interesting things we now know that he's capable of. The rest of the cast features some pleasing turns from veterans like Brennan and Fay Wray, but the whole enterprise is soaked in mawkish sentiment, a sort of worshipful attitude towards naiveté. Absolutely nothing unpredictable is allowed to happen, and there are few genuine laughs. The film's only redeeming quality, for those not already intoxicated with the talents of Debbie Reynolds, is the colorful set design and costumes which are captured faithfully and unimaginatively by Arthur Arling's photography.
This is basically a movie for people who like TV. If you watched "Wonderful World of Disney" every Sunday night back in the 70s, then you might enjoy this completely vanilla film. The less said about the film's middle section, where Tammy and the rest of the members of the household dress up as Antebellum stereotypes -- including the maid in a red bandanna mammy outfit -- by the far the better. You might find yourself, like me, with your mouth agape that a film so bland and so deliberately inoffensive could actually be so vile. It's not as if the film-makers weren't aware of what they were doing and, "oh it was a different time" -- if that were the case, they would not have put that little scene where Tammy and the maid discuss how distasteful the whole thing is. Tammy could have said something about it and took a stand, but she's not really the heroine that all the characters in the movie make her out to be. She's just another movie naif who we're supposed to adore, for no particular reason except that she's Debbie Reynolds in pigtails.