Operation Petticoat (1959)

What the trade papers reported

Motion Picture Daily’s fall 1959 charts placed the picture in the same December column as On the Beach from United Artists. An advertisement for the film in the paper’s 1959 volume gathered lines from the trade press. It credited “a slick holiday package” to Jim Powers of Variety and “another big moneymaker for the industry” to Samuel D. Berns of Motion Picture Daily. It also credited “hell-bent for hilarity” to Ivan Spear of Boxoffice, “a towering attraction” to William R. Weaver of Film Daily, and “sure to be a big moneymaker” to Jack Moffitt of The Hollywood Reporter.

A theater-by-theater chart in Motion Picture Exhibitor’s February to May 1960 volume carried the film in Chicago, Boston, Detroit, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Omaha and Louisville. It printed $22,480 beside the Chicago theater in Chicago and $17,080 beside the Memorial in Boston.

The reviews

Crowther was the reserved voice, in The New York Times of 8 Dec 1959. He found the device of women aboard a wartime submarine strained, and he estimated that “60 per cent of the witticisms” and sight gags rested on it. He listed berthing the nurses, explaining the plumbing to them and keeping the sailors at their work as the “endless petty problems” facing the commander.

The Daily Variety notice concentrated on Grant, holding that he drew laughter without lines. “Most of the gags play off him,” the reviewer wrote, and described his reactions as “blank, startled” and always underplayed. Variety’s reviewer wrote that the film weighed about as much as “a sackful of feathers” but had “a lot of laughs,” called Grant and Curtis “excellent,” and credited Edwards with “a slam-bang pace.”

Later accounts

ABC adapted the film as a series that ran from 17 Sep 1977 to 10 Aug 1979, with John Astin in Grant’s part and Curtis’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, as Barbara Duran. The second season replaced most of the cast, ratings fell, and the show was canceled after 32 episodes. Rotten Tomatoes now shows 81% from 21 reviews. The Academy Award nomination for Best Writing named Maurice Richlin, Stanley Shapiro, Joseph Stone and Paul King.

The same later accounts note two errors and trace several plot points to wartime incidents. The tender USS Bushnell, which Sea Tiger is heading to meet, was not commissioned until 1943, and the first Balao-class boat was not launched until late October 1942. Sherman’s complaint to the supply department about toilet paper follows a real letter by James Wiggins “Red” Coe of USS Skipjack, USS Bowfin torpedoed a bus, and USS Spearfish carried nurses out of Corregidor. Samuel David Dealey’s USS Harder, tinted pink as camouflage, is named as one possible source for the paint. USS Sealion was sunk at a pier in Cavite, and heat from the burning boat took the black paint off USS Seadragon, which fought for a time showing red lead undercoat and drew Tokyo Rose’s phrase “red pirate submarines.”

The destroyer USS Wren played the attacker. Three boats played Sea Tiger: USS Balao when she is pink, USS Archerfish when she is gray and black, and USS Queenfish in the opening and closing scenes. The 1959 framing material was shot at Naval Station San Diego. Most of the remaining shooting took place around Naval Station Key West, Florida, standing in for both Australia and the Philippines, with support from the Navy and the Department of Defense.

Jeff Chandler was first set to play Sherman but left to make The Jayhawkers, and Tina Louise declined one of the nurses because she thought the film had too many sex jokes. Curtis took credit for the idea. Once a star, he proposed a film in which Grant would again stare into a periscope. He had joined the Navy in World War II intending to enter the submarine service, in part because of Grant’s performance in Destination Tokyo (1943). By later accounts of his service, he served aboard a submarine tender, USS Proteus, until the war ended. Merrill’s biographical record says she was proclaimed “Hollywood’s new Grace Kelly” in 1959, a phrase that invokes Grace Kelly, and notes that Grant had once been married to her cousin, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.