PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES

 In the late fifties and early sixties a lot of highly colored, widescreen Hollywood drivel passed themselves off as comedies though laughs were largely absent but perhaps the most dishonest of the lot was Charles Walters' "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", a 'comedy' in name only based on Jean Kerr's novel which, in turn, was largely about life with her husband, the drama critic Walter Kerr.

Here David Niven is the drama critic and Doris Day the wife who doesn't like what her husband is turning into. They also have four young boys who are so different from each other it's as if they had four different fathers; certainly none of them could be the progeny of Mr. Niven. This whimsy is meant to be heart-warming. (they even have a big cuddly dog and live, not too happily. in a New York apartment which is why they move to the country), but not a frame of it rings true. It's a one joke movie in which the joke isn't funny.

Day is good in that ingratiating, strident Doris Day way of hers but Niven is horribly miscast while talented supporting players like Spring Byington, Richard Haydn, Jack Weston, Patsy Kelly and, worst of all, Janis Paige, (they don't even give her a musical number), are totally wasted with most of the 'gags' revolving around the appalling children, (and keeping the baby locked in a cage is the most tasteless joke of all). Perhaps what's most unforgivable is that given Kerr's role as part of the Broadway elite this should be so flat, unfunny and false. I cringed throughout.