With Six You Get Eggroll

Doris Day is a widow. Brian Keith is a widower. Both have kids of their own, and both are lonely… until one day when the lady meets this fellow. Yes, this 1968 family clunker is essentially The Brady Bunch with more racy humour and less terrible songs, though it's not terribly racy by today's standards and there's plenty more terrible content than mere music could ever convey. The inter-family smash-up was not exactly done in '68, especially by the square folks who made this movie, so there's a lot of hurdy-gurdy about propriety and the new permissiveness and all that. But it's written with such sitcom obviousness that it's hard to care about the sociological growing pains. Day is her usual effervescent self and Keith is her ever-sensible match, but the rest of the cast is like some kind of car crash between Norman Rockwell and Roy Lichtenstein: well-scrubbed humanoids covered in three inches of Teflon. Never before have so many had such inhumanly perfect hair for so little purpose, and while it's sort of fun to marvel at the flawlessly garish '60s colours and styles they wear, you're staring at mannequins for 90 minutes. Some minor entertainment can be had playing "spot the breakthrough," with Barbara Hershey as Keith's bratty daughter, Jamie Farr as an unthreatening hippie caricature and George Carlin as an unctuous drive-in diner waiter having nowhere to go but up. I suppose one can praise the slick direction, immaculate production and costume design (which is more than I can say for latter-day family tripe like The Pacifier), but the only people capable of enjoying this are masochists, and very sheltered ones at that. (Paramount)