Operation Petticoat **** (1959, Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, Joan O’Brien, Dina Merrill, Virginia Gregg) – Classic Movie Review 3,074

Blake Edwards’s 1959 comedy film Operation Petticoat stars Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, ideal as an admiral and a conniving lieutenant, along with Joan O’Brien, Dina Merrill and Virginia Gregg.

Director Blake Edwards’s 1959 wartime submarine comedy film Operation Petticoat stars Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, who play ideally well together as an admiral and a conniving lieutenant.

This is a warm-hearted, old-style World War Two comedy about salvaging the junked submarine Sea Tiger, where male sailors and female nurses then find themselves in close proximity.

Grant plays Lieutenant Commander (later Rear Admiral) Matt T Sherman, the submarine commander who finds himself saddled with the world’s only decrepit pink submarine, and having to deal with con-man executive officer Lieutenant J G Nicholas Holden (Curtis) and stranded nurses Lieutenant Dolores Crandall RN (Joan O’Brien), Lieutenant Barbara Duran RN (Dina Merrill), Major Edna Heywood RN (Virginia Gregg), Lieutenant Reid RN (Madlyn Rhue) and Lieutenant Colfax RN (Marion Ross).

The peerless performers Grant and Curtis get laughs even when Stanley Sharpiro and Maurice Richlin’s screenplay (a surprising Oscar nominee) runs thin on, and sometimes out of, jokes. And director Edwards keeps a funny and delightful film moving at full steam ahead.

But it’s the kind of movie that’s neglected and more or less forgotten these days yet still gets a warm welcome when it turns up on TV.

Also in the cast are Gene Evans, Arthur O’Connell, Richard (Dick) Sargent, Robert F Simon, Gavin MacLeod, Nicky Blair, Robert Gist, George Dunn, Dick Crockett, Clarence E Lung, Frankie Darro, Tony Pastor Jr, Robert E Hoy, Nicky Blair, John W Morley, Arthur O’Connell, Hal Baylorl, William R Callinan, Gordon Casell, Francis De Sales, Preston Hanson, James Lanphier, Nelson Leigh, Bob Stratton, Nino Tempo, Francis L Ward and Robert C Youmans.

A TV series followed in the 70s, with Curtis’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis as one of the nurses.

Tony Curtis greatly revered Grant and had just built his role on a sustained impersonation of him in his previous movie, Some Like It Hot.

Curtis said later: ‘I stayed close to Cary always and really admired him. There was a lot to admire.’

It was later a TV series with Jamie Lee Curtis as Lieutenant Barbara Duran, portrayed by Dina Merrill in the movie that starred Jamie Lee’s father, Tony Curtis, as Duran’s love interest, Lieutenant J G Nick Holden (Richard Gilliland in the series). After being fired from this series, Jamie Lee Curtis was cast as Laurie in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). She recalled: ‘If I hadn’t been fired from Operation Petticoat, I would have never had the opportunity to audition for a little, tiny, no-budget horror movie called Halloween, which changed my life!’ Nearly all the original cast members, also including John Astin, Richard Gilliland, Yvonne Wilder and Bond Gideon were fired for season two.

Joan Marie O’Brien (February 14, 1936 – May 5, 2025) 

Joan O’Brien enjoyed a brief but successful career on TV and film in the 1950s to the mid-1960s. She stars as Elvis Presley’s girlfriend in the 1963 It Happened at the World’s Fair. She plays survivor Susanna Dickinson in John Wayne’s 1960 epic The Alamo, and in 1961 plays his love interest in The Comancheros.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3,074

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Joan O’Brien as Second Lieutenant Dolores Crandall, NC, USAR.