Brucey_D

This is a fairly well made comedy; engaging and fairly lightweight, it would be quite forgettable were it not for Janet Leigh's somewhat animated performance. It is not that the other leads did anything bad, they just didn't do anything exceptional here. Janet Leigh was at the time married to Tony Curtis and this would be the last of five films they made together. In a case of art imitating life (or vice versa) her marriage was almost certainly in trouble by this stage; she was divorced from Tony Curtis about two years later.

I'm just watching this film again on UK TV, broadcast on 'Sony Movies Classic'. The transfer from celluloid to video is mostly OK, but my enjoyment is marred by the sound quality; they appear to have used some kind of auto-sound level control in the transfer somewhere, which has the effect of amplifying every tiny sound even when it is meant to be quiet. Another good film wrecked for posterity then...? Not quite, but almost.

If you have not yet seen either 'Mouse' film, it is probably better to see this one first, rather than view it with expectations raised by the other one.

It is easy to forget that this film was made before there had been any moon landings; plot points such as dust on the moon were real concerns for the Apollo astronauts when they landed for real, some years later. The planting of a flag (although not the first seen on film of course) was either prescient or life imitated art later on...?

Oddly enough both the look of the moon and the look of the rocket's interior are strongly reminiscent of those seen in the Wallace and Gromit animation 'a grand day out', which must surely have been inspired by the 'Mouse' film.

This film does appear on UK TV from time to time; for example on the Sony Movie Classic channel. However this raises my main disappointment concerning this film; the Sony 'watermark' is huge and obtrusive as usual, but the conversion from Celluloid to PAL video which they broadcast is almost an object lesson in 'how not to do it'; goodness knows what they did (possibly started with a bad print, converted badly to NSTC and then badly to PAL?) but the result is fuzzy, jerky in places, with poor/unsynchronized sound quality. The net result is pretty execrable; in places I'd describe it as 'almost unwatchable' in fact. This isn't the best film ever but my enjoyment of it was seriously impaired by the rotten quality of the broadcast video. I can only suppose (and hope) that commercial DVDs are better than that; they surely can't be worse...?

Six out of ten from me; might have been more but for the rotten video quality.