The Spy Who Came In From the Cold Cream

Caprice. A skier in white schusses down a slope. In his tracks comes a skier in black, firing a rifle en route. A shot hits its mark, the man in white bites the snow, and the film is off on another chapter in the further adventures of Doris Day, girl woman.

In Caprice, Doris plays a cosmetics consultant whose specialty is industrial espionage--"A spy," she claims, "who came in from the cold cream." As millions of moviegoers now know, when Doris starts crinkling her freckles and batting her luxurious spurious eyelashes, a male star is just around the corner. This time it is Richard Harris, a conversation-bugging double agent whose talent consists of electronic gimmickry and histrionic mimicry (principally of Richard Burton). The deodorant and hairspray espionage is supposed to concern itself with the sweet success of smell. But along the line it develops that Interpol is also involved. Someone has been blending hallucinogens into the cosmetics and shipping them all over the world--an LSDevice that gives the stars a chance to plod after a preposterous plot between the opening credits and the closing clinches.

What saves Caprice from utter extinction is that the film wisely dabbles in self-mockery: the heroine's deceased father, shown in a framed photograph, is Arthur Godfrey--a reminder of the role he played opposite her in The Glass Bottom Boat. But such inside jokery is about the limit of Caprice's caprice. The rest of the time it takes its story all too seriously, offers curiously unexciting murders and a wide choice of uninteresting villains.

Is it Edward Mulhare, elegant head of Femina cosmetics? Is it his roughneck rival at May Fortune cosmetics, Jack Kruschen? Is it Chemist Ray Walston, who plays his part so broadly that his dialogue seems to be dubbed? Or is it really the men who wrote and directed this bleached botch of a comedy drama?

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