Please Don’t Eat the Daisies *** (1960, Doris Day, David Niven, Janis Paige) – Classic Movie Review 9364

Director Charles Walters’s pleasing 1960 MGM Metrocolor comedy Please Don’t Eat the Daisies pleasantly and profitably pairs Doris Day with David Niven.

Jean Kerr’s bestselling book about her life with theatre critic Walter Kerr, who takes his family to live outside the big city of Manhattan to an old house in the country, is transformed into a conventional but glamorous domestic comedy by screenwriter Isobel Lennart, complete with a choice cast anxious to please and a fetching English sheepdog. The critic husband makes the mistake of mentioning to his wife a flirty encounter with Broadway star Deborah Vaughn (Janis Paige).

Amusing though Day and Niven are, as Kate and Larry Mackay, they are sometimes upstaged by the scene-stealing support, especially Janis Paige, Spring Byington, Patsy Kelly, Richard Haydn, and Jack Weston.

They also include Margaret Lindsay, John Harding, Charles Herbert, Stanley Livingston, Flip Mark and Mary Patton.

The Please Don’t Eat the Daisies title is irrelevant, of course, though it provides Day with a hit song (lyrics and music by Joe Lubin).

But the title isn’t irrelevant if you read the book on which it was based. Jean Kerr would give instructions to her six children on the rare occasions she left them with the baby sitter. She thought she’d told them everything they shouldn’t do, but she didn’t think to ask them not to eat the daisies in the vase on the dining room table.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9364

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Thanks, Margaret Kennedy.