Lover Come Back

An advertising comedy set in New York. Jerry works at an agency. His job is landing clients and he does it with drink, parties and women. Carol is at a rival agency. She does the same job and works through presentations, data and preparation. Carol reports him. A file is opened at the advertising council. Jerry arranges a witness. He talks a party girl into changing her statement and gets off. She wants something in return: to appear in commercials. Jerry has a commercial shot for her. The product is called VIP and no such product exists. The commercials go out by mistake. Now there is demand. Everybody is asking for VIP and there is nothing to sell. From there the film becomes a game of identity. Carol goes looking for the chemist who invented VIP and finds Jerry; she does not know him and he introduces himself as that chemist. The lie grows. An act as a shy scientist, a fake laboratory, and a plan that undoes itself. What the narrative is interested in is not love but selling: its whole joke is that an advertisement brings into being a thing that does not exist and nobody questions it. VIP finally being manufactured is its best idea and the consequences are entirely absurd. Rock Hudson and Doris Day are together for the second time. Tony Randall is again the third corner, this time as the agency's owner. The screenplay is by Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning and was nominated for the original screenplay Oscar. The colour and sets are the studio-comedy standard of the period, as are the split-screen telephone calls. Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall, Edie Adams and Jack Kruschen are in the cast. Delbert Mann directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1960s American studio comedy. Who it is not for: anyone measuring its sexual politics by present standards; the deception the narrative is built on belongs very much to its time.