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The heroine of course cannot raise that kind of money—but the public can and does. Aroused by the brave little woman's battle with the corporate dragon, millions of televiewers produce a deluge of dimes for a fight-the-villain fund. With Odyssean shrewdness, Kovacs pretends to yield. He makes the heroine a present of the train. Unfortunately, he announces with an evil snicker, that leaves him without a train to serve the town. The horrified townspeople turn against the heroine. Has the villain triumphed? As far as the spectator is concerned, there was never any contest. Who could prefer a conventionally pretty Hollywood Belinda to the most hilarious Rassendale who ever slept in sneer-curlers?
The Mating Game (MGM) is a busy B that crudely tramples among The Darling Buds of May, a riotously ribald novel by Britain's H. E. Bates (TIME, May 26, 1958), and reduces it to a nice, safe, bring-the-whole-family outing in the postcard pastures of Maryland.
The picnic takes place on the go-acre estate of one "Pop" Larkin (Paul Douglas), a beer-bellied, golden-hearted. Godsend-payday paragon of the old-fashioned vices: civic irresponsibility and the right to shirk. Inevitably, the Internal Revenue Service (Tony Randall) tries to catch up with him. "I'd like to look at your books," says tight-lipped Tony, the perfect black-shoe bureaucrat. Douglas looks puzzled. "I don't do much reading," he replies. But Tony forges ahead, deeper and deeper into a slough of Southern hospitality.
Douglas overwhelms him with irrelevant information, tempts him with a scrumptious Maryland crab salad, sends him tooting off on a tour of the farm with an oversexed daughter (Debbie Reynolds) who reclines invitingly in the first patch of tall grass she can find. By the time Tony gets back to the farmhouse, two of Debbie's grade-schoolboy brothers have helpfully removed the engine from his car—they are giving him, they announce, a free "ring job." At about this point, poor Tony is driven to drink (something called a Laughing Hyena: one part vermouth, two parts gin, three parts whisky). After which he of course starts to laugh like a hyena, blacks out, wakes up the next morning in Debbie's bed. "You were wonderful," she sighs adoringly. "You better get some more sleep. After last night you need it." Tony stares at the camera in horror. "What," he asks the audience, "have I done!"
He has done, as usual, a pretty slick job as a straight-face comic, and he would have done a better job—along with Actor Douglas and Actress Reynolds—if Director George Marshall had not decided to play The Mating Game at a speed less suitable to a romantic comedy than to a board of chess.