Cinema: Bringing Up Father

Take Her, She’s Mine, adapted from the Broadway play, enunciates a proposition to which any reasonable man would eagerly subscribe: “Girls turn into women.” But Jimmy Stewart is not a reasonable man. He plays the doting dad of a teen-aged twippet (Sandra Dee), and like most doting dads he has firmly decided that his little girl is always going to be a little girl.

Sandra has other ideas. She goes off to college and sings folk songs in “a place where everybody has a beard except one or two of the girls.” Father rushes to the rescue, gets caught in a culture riot inspired by Tropic of Cancer, winds up with his name on the front page (LAWYER BATTLES COPS FOR DIRTY BOOKS) and his daughter kicked out of school. Sandra then shoots off to Paris to study painting, and gets a portrait of herself reprinted in LIFE—a portrait with five cubistic breasts. Father rushes to the rescue, steps innocently into a maison de tolérance to make a phone call, gets caught in a raid, winds up with his name on the front page (LAWYER NABBED WITH UNDERWORLD QUEEN) and his daughter disgraced in the eyes of her French fiancé’s family.

And so on, till Sandra gets tired of bringing up father and the customers get sick of a script that finds sublimated incest cute.