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BIRDS DO IT
Rating: 
USA. 1966.
Director – Andrew Marton, Screenplay – Art Arthur & Arnie Kogan, Story – Leonard Kaufman, Producer – Stanley Colbert, Photography – Howard Winner, Music – Samuel Motlovsky. Production Company – Ivan Tors Productions.
Cast:
Soupy Sales (Melvin Byrd), Tab Hunter (Lieutenant Porter), Arthur O’Connell (Professor Wald), Beverly Adams (Claudine Wald), Edward Andrews (General Smithburn), Doris Dowling (Congresswoman Clanger)
Plot: Melvin Byrd is accidentally negatively ionized in a solar radiation device at the rocket propulsion laboratory where he works as a janitor. This leaves him able to defy gravity and a magnet to the opposite sex. Floating out to sea he is pursued by a gaggle of scientists, military, irresistibly attracted women and foreign spies, who each want him for their own purpose.
The title gives you the impression that it might be one of the Alfie (1965) copycats of the 1960s or one of the softcore British Confessions films of the 1970s – but this effort is in fact a witless American kid’s affair. The most painful type of comedy of all is failed slapstick at which this is a wet blanket to end all wet blankets. Soupy Sales was a comic of minor popularity in the early 1960s as a result of the tv variety show The Soupy Sales Show (1959-62) and spun his brief popularity out into two film appearances. Sales’ inanities make the activities of Abbott and Costello and Jerry Lewis, his clear source of inspiration, look a model of adulthood. The entire last half of the film consists of Sales doing gymnastics in mid-air over the ocean in a series of not very good effects while everybody tries to reel him in.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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