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By Jimmy Don Ventura, Motion Picture and Automotive Correspondent, Stockton Telegram-Dispatch and monthly contributor to the CMC Blog.

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There are motion pictures in which automobiles are props.

There are motion pictures in which automobiles are important to the plot.

And then there are motion pictures in which James Garner drives a black 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible into a swimming pool.

Once that happens, we can quit pretending Doris Day is the star.

I realize this may be controversial. The Thrill of It All was released in 1963, directed by Norman Jewison, written by Carl Reiner from a story by Reiner and Larry Gelbart, and starred Doris Day and James Garner as Beverly and Dr. Gerald Boyer. It was a major hit, grossing nearly $11.8 million domestically and finishing as the 16th-biggest hit of the year. Day was also ranked America’s No. 1 box-office star for 1963. 

Those are impressive credentials.

But none of those people had to be winched out of a swimming pool.

The Chevrolet did.

Therefore, as far as this department is concerned, the Chevrolet gets top billing.

For readers unfamiliar with the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch motion-picture rating system, I should remind you that movies are evaluated here according to standards considerably more rigorous than those used by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Acting matters.

Writing matters.

Direction matters.

But none of them matter as much as whether somebody pulls into the frame driving something with four headlights and enough chrome to interfere with television reception.

By that standard, The Thrill of It All is very nearly a masterpiece.

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FIRST, THE MOVIE

The Boyers are living what Hollywood in 1963 regarded as the ideal upper-middle-class American existence. Gerald is a successful obstetrician. Beverly is his attractive wife. They have two children, a comfortable suburban house, household help, and enough disposable income that Gerald drives a five-year-old Chevrolet convertible that today would require a home-equity loan.

Beverly is perfectly happy being Beverly until she attends dinner with Gerald at the home of one of his patients, Mrs. Fraleigh. During the evening, Beverly tells a story about Happy Soap, a product manufactured by the Fraleigh family company.

The company patriarch hears her.

This turns out to be roughly equivalent to telling Colonel Sanders you have an opinion about chicken.

Beverly winds up appearing in a Happy Soap television commercial. She is nervous, spontaneous and completely unlike the professional advertising people around her.

Naturally, America loves her.

Soon she is a television celebrity with an $80,000-a-year contract, an extraordinary amount of money in 1963 and more than enough to begin upsetting the domestic equilibrium of Dr. Boyer. The film then becomes a battle between Beverly’s exploding career and Gerald’s increasing resentment of the disruption it causes at home. 

A modern audience will undoubtedly notice that some of the film’s assumptions about husbands, wives, careers and who is supposed to be doing what around the house arrived directly from 1963 and have not aged as gracefully as the automobiles.

That is another column.

My responsibility is the parking lot.

And the parking lot is magnificent.

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BEVERLY GETS A CHRYSLER

One of the pleasures of The Thrill of It All is that Beverly Boyer doesn’t merely become successful.

She becomes successful in the precise manner America understood success in 1963.

She gets a new car.

And not some apologetic little economy car, either.

She gets a 1963 Chrysler New Yorker Town & Country four-door hardtop station wagon. The model identification is confirmed by the automotive database for the film, which catalogs an astonishing assortment of machinery appearing throughout the picture. 

This thing is wonderful.

It is enormous.

It is elegant.

It is a station wagon built before anybody thought a station wagon needed to apologize for being one.

The Town & Country belonged to that brief and glorious era when Detroit decided the family wagon should have enough chrome, glass, horsepower and square footage to qualify as a branch library.

And it suits Beverly perfectly.

She has children. She has errands. She has groceries. She has a career that suddenly requires her to move through the world with some authority.

Detroit’s answer was approximately nineteen feet of Chrysler.

I approve.

What I particularly enjoy is that the movie doesn’t stop and explain the car. Nobody points at it and says, “My goodness, Beverly, that’s a new Chrysler!”

They don’t have to.

In 1963, the audience knew.

The automobile was part of the visual vocabulary of prosperity. A new Chrysler Town & Country sitting in the driveway told the audience that Beverly’s world had changed before the screenplay needed to say another word.

Today a filmmaker would probably have her checking an app.

We’ve lost something.

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AND THEN THERE IS THE IMPALA

Gerald Boyer’s automobile is the one everybody remembers.

A 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air Impala convertible, black, with a contrasting top.

And before somebody writes the newspaper, yes, 1958 was the first year for the Impala, when it was introduced as the top Bel Air series. The film car has also been specifically identified as the V8 model 1867 convertible. 

It is spectacular.

The 1958 Chevrolet was a one-year design, longer, lower and much more heavily decorated than the famous ’57 that preceded it. Quad headlights. Broad grille. Chrome everywhere. Sculpted rear quarters. Triple taillights on the Impala. Enough brightwork to give the sun something to think about.

And Gerald drives one.

Which raises my first question.

The movie is set in 1963.

Gerald is a successful physician.

His wife has just become a national television personality earning $80,000 a year.

Why is he driving a five-year-old Chevrolet?

I spent some time considering this.

Then considerably more time.

Then Lucinda told me that if I intended to occupy the corner booth until supper I was going to have to order something besides coffee.

My conclusion is that Gerald Boyer is one of us.

He likes the car.

That is all the explanation necessary.

He could buy something newer.

He doesn’t.

He has a ’58 Impala convertible, likes his ’58 Impala convertible, and intends to continue having a ’58 Impala convertible.

This establishes Gerald as a man of considerable discernment.

Unfortunately, it does not establish him as a man who looks where he is driving.

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THE SWIMMING POOL

The Happy Soap people decide Beverly deserves a swimming pool.

There is a minor logistical difficulty.

The Boyers already have a garage.

Happy Soap solves this in the manner corporations have been solving problems since the invention of the expense account.

They remove it.

Gerald returns home at night unaware that where his garage used to be there is now a swimming pool.

He drives toward the garage.

The garage is gone.

The Chevrolet is not.

Into the pool goes the Impala.

This is one of the funniest sequences in the picture and one of the most painful automotive moments in early-1960s cinema.

There it sits.

A black 1958 Impala convertible.

In a swimming pool.

Water pours over the doors.

The upholstery is submerged.

The carpeting is submerged.

The electrical system has presumably begun sending resignation letters.

And James Garner climbs out.

I watched this sequence twice.

The second viewing did not help.

Gerald, understandably irritated at arriving home by amphibious Chevrolet, discovers boxes of Happy Soap stacked nearby.

He kicks them into the pool.

This is a mistake.

By morning, the Boyer residence has disappeared beneath a mountain of soap suds. The children believe it has snowed. Foam pours across the yard and through the house. Eventually heavy-duty Chevrolet dump trucks arrive to haul it away. The film’s vehicle listings identify both a 1955 Chevrolet Task-Force truck and a 1958 Chevrolet Task-Force Viking among the working equipment. 

At this point I became deeply invested in municipal foam-removal procedure.

The trucks are loaded.

They start away.

And the suds begin floating out of the dump beds before the trucks have even made it off the street.

This is magnificent.

Somewhere there was presumably a foreman who had been told that morning:

“Take three dump trucks over to this doctor’s house.”

“What’s he got?”

“Soap bubbles.”

And the foreman, having lived long enough to understand that questions only create additional responsibilities, probably said:

“Time and a half?”

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THE RABBIT HOLE

This is where the movie made its tactical error.

It showed me traffic.

A lot of traffic.

The climax involves Mrs. Fraleigh going into labor while the roads are snarled by an accident. Gerald has to reach her, eventually getting assistance from a mounted police officer, and the resulting sequence turns a major thoroughfare into an automotive archaeological dig. The script itself places the maternity emergency in the middle of the immobilized traffic. 

I stopped watching the actors.

Completely.

There are Fords.

Chevrolets.

Plymouths.

Mercurys.

Dodges.

Cadillacs.

A Renault Dauphine.

A Mercedes-Benz 190 SL.

A Ford Thunderbird.

A Corvair.

A Falcon.

A Valiant.

A Mercury Comet.

A 1959 Ford Fairlane 500 Galaxie.

A 1963 Ford Galaxie 500.

A 1958 Ford Country Sedan.

There is even a Borgward Isabella Coupé wandering around in there, presumably because somebody on the production staff had decided the audience needed a German automobile most Americans couldn’t identify even when it was new.

The film’s documented vehicle list is ridiculous in the best possible way. It contains more than two dozen identifiable models, stretching from early-1950s Fords through brand-new 1963 machinery. 

And because the movie was actually made in the early 1960s, these aren’t collector cars.

They’re just cars.

That’s what makes old movies such wonderful accidental time machines.

A 1959 Mercury isn’t entering the shot because somebody rented one from a picture-car company and spent six weeks removing modern radial tires.

It’s parked there because somebody owned a 1959 Mercury.

The streets are filled with ordinary automobiles living ordinary lives.

Four-door sedans.

Wagons.

Convertibles.

Cheap cars.

Expensive cars.

Cars three years old.

Cars ten years old.

Cars with whitewalls.

Cars with hubcaps.

Cars that haven’t yet been informed they are classics.

You could pause almost any traffic scene in The Thrill of It All, hand the resulting photograph to Earl, and lose him for a week.

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THE ROLLS-ROYCE MATERNITY WARD

But the film has one more automotive ace.

Mrs. Fraleigh is having her baby.

Traffic has stopped.

The hospital is tantalizingly close.

And she is riding in a 1959 Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine with Park Ward coachwork. The car has been identified as an early Phantom V, Park Ward design 980. 

There are worse places to give birth.

The Phantom V was Rolls-Royce’s grand postwar limousine, the sort of automobile intended for heads of state, industrialists, royalty and people whose luggage traveled better than most Americans.

And now one is a delivery room.

Gerald reaches the stranded Rolls and delivers the baby in the back seat, with Beverly helping. The AFI synopsis specifically confirms that the couple’s reconciliation takes place during the birth in the Fraleighs’ Rolls-Royce. 

Think about the automotive progression of this movie.

A Chrysler station wagon represents Beverly’s new independence.

A Chevrolet Impala gets drowned because her success has literally altered the Boyer household.

Chevrolet dump trucks arrive to remove the consequences.

A traffic jam made up of practically the entire American automobile industry traps everybody at the climax.

And finally a Rolls-Royce becomes an obstetrics ward.

This isn’t a romantic comedy.

It’s a road test with Doris Day in it.

There is also a 1958 Imperial Crown Imperial limousine listed among the movie’s vehicles, which briefly sent me down another trail because from certain angles and in nighttime scenes one can begin doubting one’s own relatives, much less sixty-year-old limousines. But the maternity car is the Rolls-Royce Phantom V. 

I am satisfied.

Rex says I have to stop calling him after 10:00 p.m. about British coachwork.

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ABOUT DORIS DAY

Since this is technically a movie review, I suppose I should mention the people.

Doris Day is terrific.

There is a reason she was America’s top box-office star. Beverly could easily have become irritating, but Day gives her warmth and enough bewilderment about her own success that the character remains sympathetic.

James Garner is equally good because he understands something essential about comedy:

Don’t tell the audience you’re being funny.

Garner reacts to escalating insanity with the expression of a man who suspects everybody else received instructions he somehow missed.

The two work beautifully together.

Norman Jewison keeps the picture moving, while the Reiner-Gelbart story has the increasingly elaborate structure of a machine designed to convert ordinary suburban problems into catastrophe. The movie runs 108 minutes and was successful enough to become the year’s 16th-biggest hit. 

Some of its attitudes toward marriage and gender belong unmistakably to its period.

But the comedy frequently survives them.

And the cars certainly do.

Well.

Most of them.

The Impala has had a difficult evening.

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THE VERDICT

I award The Thrill of It All:

★★★★½ out of five hubcaps.

This is an exceptionally high rating.

The half-point deduction is for putting a 1958 Impala convertible into a swimming pool.

I considered deducting an entire point.

Then I realized that without putting the Impala into the pool, the movie would lose one of the greatest automotive sight gags of the decade.

So half a hubcap.

Everything else is here.

A 1963 Chrysler New Yorker Town & Country.

A ’58 Impala convertible.

A 1959 Rolls-Royce Phantom V.

Heavy-duty Chevrolet trucks hauling soap bubbles.

A Mercedes 190 SL.

A Thunderbird.

Cadillacs.

Galaxies.

Fairlanes.

Corvairs.

Mercurys.

Plymouths.

Dodges.

A Renault Dauphine that appears to have wandered into the wrong country.

And enough late-’50s and early-’60s street traffic to keep an automobile enthusiast hitting Pause until the rest of the family quietly leaves the room.

By the closing credits, Doris Day has saved her marriage, James Garner has delivered a baby, Happy Soap has nearly destroyed suburban America, and a perfectly good Chevrolet has spent enough time underwater to qualify for Coast Guard registration.

That’s entertainment.

And somewhere beneath the surface of that swimming pool sits a 1958 Impala convertible, waiting patiently for somebody to drain the deep end, pull the plugs, change every fluid in it, remove the seats, dry the carpet, repack the wheel bearings, clean the electrical connections and explain to the insurance adjuster why the accident report says:

LOCATION OF COLLISION: GARAGE.

ACTUAL LOCATION OF GARAGE: UNKNOWN.

Four and a half hubcaps.

Highly recommended.

But if the wife tells you somebody came by while you were at work and put in a swimming pool, Jimmy Don Ventura has one piece of advice.

Park on the street.

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