Olympic Clowning

Walk, Don't Run. In crowded Tokyo during the 1964 Olympic Games, a titled British industrial giant cannot find a hotel room. Noticing an APT TO SHARE ad on the embassy bulletin board, he orders his limousine over to the address given and starts one-upping a startled working girl.

"But you're a man," she protests.

"Yes, I suppose so."

"I'd prefer sharing my apartment with a woman."

"So would I," he says and, nodding briskly, moves right in.

Despite a wheezy plot that must be older than Gary Grant, Walk, Don't Run has the ageless advantage of Grant himself, a galloping 62 and perfectly cast as the anything-but-tired tycoon. A sort of magnate cum laude, Grant herein relinquishes his customary Romeo role to play Eros by proxy, and no man could play it better. Instead of making passes at his luscious roommate, Samantha Eggar, he sublets half of his half of her apartment to a lanky Olympic race-walker (Jim Mutton) and starts showing the younger generation how one thing can lead to another.

Though he can make any flippancy sound quotable just by arching his eyebrows over it, Grant is never left on his own to build a flimsy notion into a one-man show. Sol Saks's dialogue bristles amiably from first to last, and when blithe spirits threaten to overflow the tiny three-room flat, Director Charles Walters shuffles words, pranks and players in and around greater Tokyo with a perfectly relaxed air. Hutton, a quizzical comic talent packed into a skyscraper frame, hilariously displays a pained embarrassment over his skill as a wiggly-hipped 30-mile walker, and he passes the test as a farceur by keeping pace with Grant. Samantha nips through her first comedy role with such unexpected verve that she will probably be asked to impersonate plucky, romantic dream girls for years to come. Confronted by an office pal while a couple of drowsy strangers storm her bathroom one morning, she dryly quips: "The others don't get up until noon." Altogether, Don't Run is champion-class drollery--slight, stylish, graceful, and abrim with evidence that Hollywood's honorable high-comedy traditions are being well preserved.

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