House Calls

Concocted by an unhealthy quartet of writers, this suggests a slightly wacky, liberated variant on Universal's comedies of eighteen years earlier, when Rock Hudson flashed his pearly teeth at Doris Day. Once again it's love between two pros: Matthau is a shambling, philandering doctor at a mediocre hospital, while Jackson leads one of those nebulous American business lives, making and selling cheesecake. He doesn't put a foot wrong, but the garrulous, charmless Jackson character comes over as the original pain in the neck. Background details of hospital life are handled much more astutely than the main plot. It's a big mystery how Zieff (of Slither and Hearts of the West) allowed it to go off at half-cock.