1963 - COME FLY WITH ME - the old single girls on the make for a husband film.

Talk about a personal nostalgia wallow, Come Fly With Me, was a film that seemed to be in constant circulation on the CBS Thursday Night Movie when I was growing up.  I have seen pieces of this film many times.  The film was produced by Anatole de Grunwald who seemed to specialize in these multiple cast, multiple story films like The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls Royce.  This cast isn't as star studded as those films, it's sort of the B squad of starlets and TV actors.

Dolores Hart is the cynical stewardess looking for a rich husband, she thinks she has scored with a European Baron played by Karl Bohm.  Bohn is actually an impoverished diamond smuggler.  If Dolores had watched more movies she would have known that Bohm played the crazed killer in Peeping Tom who stabbed women with his camera tripod.  Lois Nettleton is the stewardess who has been used and abused by married men and is staying away from nice guy Karl Malden in a very rare romantic lead part.  Nettleton was on about every TV show I every watched in the 60's and 70's.  Finally there is Pamela Tiffin who always seemed to get cast as the beautiful but wacky all American girl.  Tiffin spends most of the film trying to get Hugh O'Brian to abandon his loose moral playboy ways.

Well anyway the girls have lots of boyfriend problems as they are photographed on location in widescreen in Paris and Vienna.  Karl Malden probably comes off the best in this film.  Malden had been associated with Elia Kazan and I suppose Come Fly With Me is sort of a career comedown but hey he gets to romance a woman about 20 to 30 years younger than him.  Probably the best thing in the film is the Jimmy Van Heusen /Sammy Cahn title song but apparently they couldn't get the Frank Sinatra version so they settled for Frankie Avalon crooning away on the title track. 

Come Fly With Me was fun to watch because it is such an early 1960's film.  The weird attitudes about that sex stuff have to be heard and seen to be believed.  If a woman sleeps with a man before she is married no good will come of it.  In  Dolores Hart's case she may end up as a nun after sleeping with Karl Bohm. 

109 minutes, written by William Roberts.