Boy Meets Kiddies

A Ticklish Affair is unlikely to tickle anybody who is not addicted to an old Hollywood plot--boy meets girl's kiddies. Three lads want to find a husband for Mommy, a Navy widow (Shirley Jones). One day they flash a semaphoric SOS from their bedroom window toward the naval base across the bay, succeed in alerting a considerable portion of the U.S. Navy. When a suitably goodhearted, simple-minded commander (Gig Young) comes jeeping to the house, the boys look him over, decide he is just the man for Mommy. From then on, the story cruises so predictably that viewers may get an uneasy feeling of having somewhere, somehow, seen the movie before.

A main ingredient of this formula is the rescue: one of the kids gets into some dire difficulty and is saved by the prospective groom. When Uncle Red Buttons brings over a lot of surplus weather balloons and rigs up a harness so the boys can try gravity-free "moon-walking," little Grover (Peter Robbins) breaks tether and is soon soaring over San Diego and out to sea. Instantly, much of Southern California is in a state of emergency. An aircraft carrier, a fire engine, a fleet of patrol boats, an LST, swarms of helicopters, jets and amphibian planes, an ambulance, police cars and a posse of excitable civilians mobilize into an armada of ineptitude. Finally Gig commandeers a blimp, has himself lowered on a life raft, grabs the flyaway as he floats by.

But how to hoist those big balloons up through the hatch of the blimp? Nobody thinks of cutting the strings and letting the balloons just drift away as Gig holds on to Grover. Instead, Buttons takes a rifle and plugs the balloons one by one while hanging from the blimp by his belt. Eventually the last balloon goes splop--psssssssss. And so does the movie.

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