Kiss Them for Me

During World War II, a navy pilot (Cary Grant) woos a ship-builder’s fiancé while on leave with his buddies in San Francisco.

Kiss Them for Me should never have been made. Star Cary Grant fought for it, as he wanted to bring an ongoing problems for veterans (what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) to the public’s attention, but the compromises required by the studio all but bury this aspect and reduce the film to little more than a romantic comedy, and a bad one at that.

This is a movie unable to find its tone, a problem apparent in the opening sequence where the pilots are en-route to San Francisco. One of them elects to get some sleep, and while the others banter through some light-hearted comedy, the sleeping pilot cries out in terror, caught up in a reoccurring nightmare in which he’s about to be shot down.

This sort of problem resurfaces time and again, as the film abruptly shifts between serious drama and lighthearted comedy.

Compounding the issue is the curious addition of Jane Mansfield, who does her best Marilyn Monroe-esque breathy blonde but ultimately has nothing to do with the story.

Perhaps what’s frustrating the most about Kiss Them for Me is that Cary Grant made it instead of Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, which he turned down due to the age difference between himself and Audrey Hepburn. Grant would have been perfect in Wilder’s film, as he proved six years later when he starred with Hepburn in Charade, which, incidentally, was directed by Kiss Them for Me’s director, Stanley Donen.