Man’s Favorite Sport?
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by John Fenton Murray and Steve McNeill from a story by Pat Frank
1964/USA
Gibraltar Productions/Laurel Productions/Universal Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental
[box] Tagline: It takes a girl to supply the answer![/box]
Hawks’s homage to his own Bringing Up Baby only had me longing for the original.
Roger Willoughby (Rock Hudson) works for a sporting goods company and has written a best-seller on fishing. His well-kept secret is that he has never been fishing (or camping or anything outdoorsy) in his life. Abigail Page (Paula Prentiss) and her friend want him to participate in a fishing tournament to be held at a resort they do PR for. Roger refuses but Abigail blackmails him into it.
When Roger gets to the lake, he proves to be as hopeless at fishing etc. as he feared. But Abigail is on hand to “help” him, getting him in one annoying predicament after another. She keeps trying to woo him as well, without much success until …
The plot summary should give you an idea of the tie-in to Bringing Up Baby (1938). The movie also harkens back to Christmas in Connecticut (1945), in which Barbara Stanwyck has to pretend to be a homemaking expert, and a scene in Libeled Lady (1936) in which William Powell catches a fish by accident and gets dragged around a lake. Try one of those for a more enjoyable comedy.
