Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

JLRMovieReviews Doris Day and Richard Widmark!, yes Richard Widmark, are a married couple who move to the country to leave the city life behind them. They are also in the middle of adopting, because "they say" when you adopt a child, you have one of your own, which is what they really want. That basically is the plot, without complications. The last time I saw this was on the last weekend of August in 1997, so I have a mental connection with this movie and a tragedy in the news. I didn't really have good memories of it, but, upon seeing it recently, I found it surprisingly funny near the beginning. But most of its jokes comes with innuendos of a particular sort, part of it being about having babies (I did enjoy the line, about "exhausting" every possible means in having a baby.) The movie seemed to enjoy making fun of Gig Young's proclivities, who is a next-door neighbor whose wife knows nothing about his extra-curricular activities. Directed by Gene Kelly, this should have been made in color and maybe with a more comedic actor. I mean, really, Richard Widmark! He's a great actor in westerns and rough 'n' tough movies, but here he seems out of his element. Despite the amusing situations and inevitable complications from the presence of the investigator from the baby agency, which seems a bit confusing to the viewer, this still feels like it's missing something. It simply doesn't come off very well. It's not your usual brisk Doris Day fare, and that is probably why it bombed at the time it came out. If you're a die hard Doris day fan, you may want to see this once, but then you can find Pillow Talk for some real baby making.

Angus T. Cat I saw this movie on TV when I was young, about ten or eleven. I thought then it was funny and adult in the sense of being a bit dirty and knowing. I saw it again yesterday. I am now between thirty and death too. "The Tunnel of Love" is a time capsule, but a bemusing one. The humour is degrading to the female characters, especially the wife trying to get pregnant, the constantly pregnant wife next door, and the adoption agency investigator who is immediately judged by her looks. I felt with the investigator when she complained to the husband that Gig Young's character made a pass at her five minutes after meeting her. Almost as bad as the nudge nudge pinch pinch attitude of the neighbor and his advice that his happily married friend should bag a babe is the total lack of common sense in the characters' actions. Why does the insulted investigator drive back to make her own pass at the husband? Why does the husband conclude that he has fathered the investigator's baby when it turns out that she is married? (And before this is revealed at the end, the audience and the husband haven't got a clue that the investigator has a husband herself.)Why does the husband give her a check for a thousand dollars without asking her more questions- like how he can be be so certain that he's the one who got her pregnant? Why is the wife next door constantly getting "off to the races" if the husband's sole contribution to parenthood is telling their kids to shut up before he ships them off to boarding school? If you're fascinated by 50s attitudes toward sex, "The Tunnel of Love" is a revealing portrait of the sort of humour that the artist character might highlight in a cartoon to sell to Playboy or one of the more downmarket men's magazines of the era. Behind the winking and the flirting of the actress in the party scene there's a stream of melancholy, especially in the story of the West Point student in his second year whose family has decided that he will marry his pregnant girlfriend: as Gig Young snaps, he'll have bars on his shoulders and a toddler in his lap. All those martinis and double whiskies and Young's box of tranquilizers that he pops like popcorn point at the terror and sadness behind the whoopie. The husband's dinner with the investigator says it all: he has a bottle of ale and a lamb chop from the children's menu. All of the characters are children themselves. Thank God times have changed.

moonspinner55 Painful farce, adapted from Peter De Vries' novel which then became the kind of play dinner-theaters specialized in. It features Richard Widmark in a humiliating 'comedic' role as a man whose wife can't get pregnant, leading him into a drunken excursion with a sexy adoption agent, whom he later believes he has knocked up. Widmark is not suited to this material, which should be played nimbly and without force. Director Gene Kelly, of all people, is likewise not suited to guide an intense actor like Widmark through the rigors of light comedy (which can be more precarious than a gangster drama). Doris Day is the put-upon wife, and I felt for her. Even with a feeble script and dim handling, Day manages a ray of sunshine or two. Gig Young, in the patented Gig Young/friendly neighbor role, helps out a little bit, but "The Tunnel Of Love" is a frigid affair. *1/2 from ****

talliecat41 Maybe I'm a bit protective of my favorite actress, but I have seen one too many movies where Doris Day is intentionally deceived by the man she loves. Usually Miss Day is dooped in light-hearted fun, but I almost felt as victimized as she in "Tunnel of Love." I did not enjoy this movie one bit.