Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Send Me No Flowers Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 30, 2016

Note: This film is available as part of the Doris Day and Rock Hudson Romantic Comedy Collection.

Despite their reputation as the “it” couple of late 50s and early 60s romantic comedies, it’s perhaps surprising to note that Doris Day and Rock Hudson actually only made three feature films together, the trio assembled in Doris Day and Rock Hudson Romantic Comedy Collection. Pillow Talk (which was released as a standalone Blu-ray in 2012 as a Digibook and then again almost exactly a year later in this edition) was one of the most overwhelming box office sensations of its era, ending up with an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and several other nominations (including, rather incredibly, the sole nomination for Best Actress that Doris Day received over her long and varied career). The film world moved slower back then, and it took a little over two years for a follow up of sorts to appear in the form of Lover Come Back, a film which pretty much simply retold large swaths of Pillow Talk’s tale of bickering folks who can’t see the clear truth that they’re actually madly in love with each other. Lover Come Back wasn’t anywhere near the smash that Pillow Talk had been, but it still raked in considerable dough and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Three years after the second pairing of Hudson and Day, their final film together, Send Me No Flowers, came out. This one departed rather radically from the precedent set by the first two films, with Hudson and Day not contentious singles but instead a seemingly happily married couple who then get entangled in a farcical set of circumstances due to the Hudson character’s incipient hypochondria.

In 1963, Norman Jewison directed Doris Day in what I personally feel is one of her strongest sixties efforts, the often hilarious but just as often very smart The Thrill of It All, a film which paired Day not with Rock Hudson but with James Garner. The Thrill of It All mercilessly skewered the rampant ad culture of the early sixties, in fact much more potently than the Madison Avenue based Lover Come Back. (Making fun of the increasing public awareness of advertisements on television and elsewhere became something of a cinematic staple in comedies of the early to mid-sixties, as evidenced by 1964’s quite funny Good Neighbor Sam, which contains a great running gag built around the old Hertz Rent-a-Car commercials which had a guy flying into “the driver’s seat”.) A year after Jewison teamed with Day on The Thrill of It All, he returned with her, this time indeed paired with Hudson, in the amusing if pretty trite Send Me No Flowers. Like Lover Come Back, The Thrill of It All and even the more or less concurrent Good Neighbor Sam, Send Me No Flowers seems to be trafficking in the same send ups of Madison Avenue excesses in its first moments, as hypochondriac George Kimball (Rock Hudson) drifts half asleep through a litany of symptoms which are accompanied by memories of commercials he's recently seen.

Send Me No Flowers finds Hudson and Day not as bickering would be lovers, but instead as more or less happily marrieds. Day portrays loving wife Judy Kimball, who puts up with her husband’s nonstop array of imagined illnesses. In fact, George is so concerned with his health that he’s arranged for his second complete checkup in as many weeks. The film has already taken a needless detour into physical shtick courtesy of a kind of stupid sequence which finds Judy locked out of the house in her housecoat and slippers, and with an armful of deliveries from the milkman. This tendency to divert the story from its basic forward thrust into silly sidelines is one of Send Me No Flowers’ less successful strategies.

George overhears his doctor, family friend Ralph Morrissey (Edward Andrews), discussing the impending mortality of another patient and of course jumps to the conclusion that the good doctor is actually discussing him. That leads him to coax neighbor Arnold Nash (Tony Randall) into helping him prepare for the supposedly inevitable, which includes finding Judy a potential new mate to take George’s place after his demise. When an old lover of hers named Bert Power (Clint Walker) shows up (in another silly scene involving a golf cart and Power on a horse—and no, that’s not a typo), the scene seems to be set for a “happily ever after” which will take place, well, after George.

A number of subplots are folded into this basic scenario, including a womanizing friend of George’s named Winston Burr (Hal March) who preys on soon to be divorced women, as well as George’s attempts to buy neighboring cemetery plots not just for him and Judy, but for any prospective husband, a task made “simpler” by the obsequious mortuary director Mr. Akins (Paul Lynde). Typical misunderstandings accrue to the point that the film has a hard time dealing with consequences, leading to a drawn out finale that is more tiresome than humorous.

The entire cast seems slightly distracted throughout Send Me No Flowers, and the film is frankly not a great fit for the talents of Hudson, who is forced to play a kind of weakling shlub. Part of this may be due to the fact that the film is based on a very short-lived (like barely a month) Broadway play that starred David Wayne and Nancy Olson. The stars seem shoehorned into this one rather and the results are somewhat more uneven than in the two previous Day-Hudson pairings.

Send Me No Flowers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Send Me No Flowers is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Universal Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. There is some noticeable wobble on display through the vintage Universal logo and then the first moments of the credits, but that problem quiets down rather quickly. What's evident after the credits though is what looks like an older master, or at least one culled from old elements which are not in great condition. Along with the typical age related wear and tear, there's pretty bad fade on display, something that tamps down the film's palette fairly noticeably throughout the presentation. While flesh tones are pasty at best and pretty brown at worst, at least some brighter tones like (especially) greens have weathered the vagaries of time at least a bit better than the rest of the palette. Detail is middling, with even some midrange shots providing not much more than baseline levels. The opening montage, which features a lot of opticals and some black and white moments (see screenshot 6) is even softer and grittier looking than the bulk of the enterprise. (The film employs a lot of opticals, not just with regard to traditional techniques like dissolves, but also "fancier" scene changing elements like flipped frames.) Grain is fairly heavy at times (something that makes me wonder whether this was sourced from secondary elements), but encounters no resolution issues.

Send Me No Flowers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Send Me No Flowers features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which may not set audiophile hearts on fire, but which doesn't have the occasional anomalies that hampered the track on Lover Come Back. I'm about to go all music geek on you, so forewarned is forearmed. The title tune of this film was written by a certain team named Burt Bacharach and Hal David, with Doris Day double tracked in the fashion that Andy Williams had recently made immensely popular with his similarly multitracked vocals on "Can't Get Used to Losing You." Only here's the thing—pay attention to the credits, with an understanding that things like font size and order are worked out in great detail through contract negotiations. What's interesting about this (at least for music geeks) is that Hal David gets first billing, and in a larger font (and with all capital letters), while Burt is relegated to second billing and in a noticeably smaller typeface. It means nothing, of course, but it piqued my interest, as things like this tend to do. Doris doesn't sound particularly at ease finessing the shorter, assymetrical phrases that Bacharach prefers, but the music sounds fine throughout this presentation in terms of fidelity. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly and there's no real damage of any import to cause concern.

Send Me No Flowers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1:59)

Note: This is an "old school" Universal disc which boots right to the film. The "menu" (such as it is) is accessed with the Pop Up Menu button on your remote.

Send Me No Flowers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Send Me No Flowers has a few laughs along the way, but it's probably the least consistently funny film that Day and Hudson made together. Video quality is the most lackluster of the three films included in the Day-Hudson set, though audio quality is fine. With caveats noted, Send Me No Flowers comes Recommended.