DEAR BRIGITTE, a third time tapping the funny bone for James Stewart with director Henry Koster and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, this 1965 family comedy followed their 1962 hit Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation and the less successful but still popular ’63 goof Take Her, She’s Mine. This did weaker business and snooty reviewers scoffed, but while not nearly as fun as the first offering, it’s definitely better than the wan second. Johnson didn’t care to take screen credit; that went solely to Hal Kanter, called in for rewrites. *

Absent-minded college poetry professor ‘Robert Leaf’ (Stewart, 56) lives on  an old riverboat docked in San Francisco Bay (filming done in Sausolito) with his wife ‘Vina’ (Glynis Johns, 41) their teenage daughter ‘Pandora’ (Cindy Carol, 19) and 8-year-old son ‘Erasmus’ (Billy Mumy, 10). Typical teen Pandora has a crush on ‘Ken’ (Fabian, 21) but Erasmus has his own concerns. Not only is he a math prodigy (to poet Robert’s alarm) he pines for a certain French movie goddess, writing to her nightly. Will his genius for numbers serve to sum together with her perfectly aligned measurements?

VINA:“A psychiatrist?”   ROBERT: “You know, those fellows who understand everything you’re saying even though you don’t know what you’re talking about.”    ROBERT: “Well he’s a nut.”  VINA: “How do you know?”  ROBERT: “He just looks like one.”  VINA: “All the really good ones do.”

The much-missed Johns is always welcome. Second-billed pop-sensation-turned actor Fabian has little to do, he’s there mainly to draw pre-Beatles teenyboppers. A drawback is Ed Wynn, playing a neighbor and serving as 4th-wall breaking narrator: for this viewer, Wynn was excellent in his few dramatic roles (The Great Man, The Diary Of Anne Frank) but his sillypants goofus comic persona, meant to be ‘adorable’ always left me cold, he’s irksome here.

“I don’t care how smart they are or how many degrees they’ve got or how that nuclear gadget of theirs works on the drawing board. An accident is still an accident and sooner or later they’re gonna blow us all to hell-and-gone-outta-here. It’s only a question of time before one of those fellas shows up some morning with a hangover and pulls the wrong switch or puts too much uranium in the plutonium and WHAM!”

Stewart puts his customary energy in, though this time he employs stammering almost like he’s doing an impression of himself. He does have great rapport with the remarkably sharp Mumy, one of the best, most natural child actors of his day. The script, past its predictable joke setups, does deserve applause for a couple of early-warning cries against the ominous approach of ‘Jetsonland’ and the techno tornado that now rules a large part of our lives.

“You mark my words, five years from now, they’ll be nothing on this campus but science. Nothing but scientists as far as the eye can see. And all that old-fashioned jazz that used to clutter up a college like literature and philosophy and art—forget it! Forget it! It’ll be as dead as the minuet. And instead of studying man and his dreams of beauty, everybody’ll be working on a machine that smokes Virginia hams electronically or makes a hen lay eggs like a machine gun….there’s a great big whopper, a machine that does so much so fast that it automatically throws a million men out of work by this afternoon at five o’clock. “

Even those not inclined to the period ‘cuteness’ of the enterprise will be charmed when ‘Dear Brigitte’ finally shows up; the divine BB’s only on screen for 6 minutes near the finish. She’s enchanting and Mumy properly looks to have arrived in 7th Heaven. **

George Duning adds a pleasant touch with his music score. Featuring John Williams, Jack Kruschen, Alice Pearce (bright bit as an employment clerk), Jesse White, Charles Robinson, Percy Helton, James Brolin (as a college student). Made for $2,700,000, placing 56th in ’65 with a gross of $4,700,000. 100 minutes.

* This was going to “Erasmus With Freckles”, after the John Haase novel on which it was based. But Bardot, 30, agreed to appear only if her name wasn’t in the credits or ad campaign. So the title was tricked to notify audiences she was on view somewhere in the finished product. Regrettably, American moviegoers missed the boat on her other 1965 comedy, the spirited Viva Maria! That one (a fave) drew five times the response internationally. Stewart landed a hit that year with the Civil War story Shenandoah and a top adventure in The Flight Of The Phoenix. Billy Mumy, already familiar from several years of TV spots and a few movies, jumped further into fame that in ’65 by starting the 3-season, 84-episode run of Lost In Space.

** Mumy, in 2016, on Stewart: “of the 57 years I’ve been in show business, and of all the people I’ve worked with, he has, since 1964, been the #1 on the top of that list, in every potential category”—on BB: “I know I was only ten years old, but trust me–I enjoyed the view.”