If the age of chivalry were still alive, producer-director-actor Tommy Noonan would have to be dubbed a Knight of the Bath. His production of Promises, Promises!, in which Jayne Mansfield bared all in a bubbly bath scene, literally cleaned up. Thanks to the sensation created by Playboy's celebrated pictorial uncoverage a year ago this month, the film garnered more publicity than any other save Cleopatra and ranked high enough in box-office listings to encourage Noonan to take off in the same direction. This time he is pin-upping his hopes on lovely Mamie Van Doren, who takes off, in his new film, even more than she did in her February Playboy photo feature. The result is called Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt (Noonan-McGlashan Productions--to be released this month), a zany comedy that mixes generous helpings of Freudian tomfoolery with ample proportions of Van Doren tub-nudery--an unbeatably Psychobathic combination.
The titular nuts are a trio of hard-shell neurotics, two male and the third an attractive blonde (called Saxie Symbol), who share a Hollywood mansion for reasons of economy. The role of Saxie is somewhat thin dramatically--she's a misanthropic stripteuse who exhibits her hatred for men by exhibiting herself to them--but Mamie fleshes the part out skillfully. Deciding to cut costs on their psychoanalysis bills, the trio calls in a patsy (Tommy Noonan), indoctrinates him with their respective neuroses, and sends him off to a high-priced lady psychiatrist (Ziva Rodann). With predictable confusion, the shrink misunderstands that Noonan is telling the tales of three friends and concludes that he has an unprecedented triple personality. Immediately, she arranges a closed-circuit televiewing of this rare specimen for her colleagues, but the scene is accidentally transferred to a national hookup by a technician blissfully absorbed in a Playboy centerfold. A couchful of complications ensue until nebbish Noonan suddenly acquires backbone and gives each of his alter egos, in the end, a good, swift, curative kick.
The bath tableau, photographed behind the scenes exclusively for Playboy, occurs earlier. It is not entirely essential to the development of the plot, but nonetheless gives Mamie excellent dramatic exposure: While Noonan sits in her bathroom, with his back turned, she attends to her ablutions with laving care and chattily unravels the complexities of her muddled psyche. Mamie's bath, incidentally, is a combination of shaving cream (intended to form lather) and beer (intended to draw laughs).
The film's farcicality was exceeded only by the buffoonery off camera. Very much aware of the publicity garnered by Jayne Mansfield through her Playboy feature, Mamie told Noonan, "You made Jayne infamous by sitting on her bed. Think what you can do for me in a tub!" Noonan promptly hopped into the hops with his leading lady. References to Jayne were frequent in the banter during the shooting of the bath scene. After her last take, for example, Mamie jokingly inquired, "Did we get any shots that will get Hugh Hefner arrested?"
Although we witnessed most of the beer-bath cinematography, we never did indulge a temptation to ask Mamie if, like Jayne, she would claim she posed in her first nudie movie for the sake of art, because it was obvious from what we'd seen that Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt is both ale and arty.
