Much as I always love a Jimmy Stewart film, this is a rather lame comedy, interesting mainly for an early Jerry Goldsmith score. Sandra Dee tries hard to shake her golly Molly character she played in A Summer Place (she is named Molly here too) and Audrey Meadows does well in her perfunctory role, but the script is just too lame to engender interest.
A primary flaw in my opinion is that Stewart's character was too unlikeable. The main character of the concerned father should have been more hesitant about interfering in his daughter's college life. It would have engendered more laughs and maintained sympathy with the character. But here Stewart's character is far too aggressive and possessive to the point of irritation. His character would come across as such even more so in our more enlightened times. Yelling at his daughter, yelling at her boyfriend, calling him a punk several times in the film and otherwise meddling in what should be his daughter's "space" as they would later say (the film is from 1963 so just short of the hippie generation) hardly endears him to a modern audience, in my opinion.
In a dated film like this it's difficult to judge how flat the comedy was in 1963, but words like "virgin" would hardly gain a laugh today. Some scenes seem especially dated, such as the coffee house scene with Bob Denver as a folksinger, the fast French cars, while it's hard to imagine that a writer would attempt a laugh by having the parents listen to a record at 331/3 when it's supposed to be played at 78 or 45. Like how desperate can writers be to include something as ludicrous as that for laughs. It might have been funny when electronic music was first invented but not in 1963! Similarly lame was the scene in the dorm with the French girl students, as if having a group of students yelling in French was supposed to elicit bowls of laughter.
But any film starring Jimmy Stewart, in my view the greatest of all American film actors, including Marlon Brando, can never be a waste of time.
