WITH SIX YOU GET EGGROLL, Doris Day’s 39th and last movie, ended her feature film career on a relative winner. Directed by Howard Morris in 1968, this put-two-families-together-in-cramped-space lark was preceded a few months earlier in the year by the somewhat similar fact-spawned Yours, Mine and Ours, which was a big hit. Day had another ’68 effort prior to this, but Where Were You When The Lights Went Out? did her no favors—she called it an “alleged comedy”—following the downward track of Do Not Disturb, Caprice and The Ballad Of Josie, which all bombed out. This one—though it ultimately degenerates into a ‘madcap’ car chase involving ‘hippies’ that like all spoofing of the counterculture is truly awful—for most of its 95 minutes rates as pretty good fun, occasionally even delightful. Made for $ 2,445,000 it placed 26th with a gross of $14,300,000 and at 45, DD decided enough was enough. *

Widowed with three sons, ‘Abby McClure’ (Doris) runs her late husbands’ lumberyard. Her sister sets Abby up with an old acquaintance from high school, widower ‘Jake Iverson’ (Brian Keith, 46) who has a teenage daughter. The lonely adults spark, and in due time get together, but mixing the suspicious and jealous offspring is a problem, especially the resistance from the girl and Abby’s oldest boy, also a teenager. What are the chances all will work out?  Oh, not hard to guess, but the likable cast make the confection work, and it’s miles better than the rest of the year’s cringe-inducing comedies: lists of that dross can be mined on this site’s reviews of The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz and The Private Navy Of Sgt. O’Farrell.

Day and Keith mesh well, the two little boys are amusingly played by Richard Steele and Jimmy Bracken, and a bonus is Barbara Hershey, 19 in her film debut, as the arrangement-tested daughter. George Carlin, 30, also makes his movie debut, but like most of his infrequent film work (he didn’t do another until Car Wash, eight years later) it doesn’t showcase his oddball take to advantage.

The screenplay was a quad job: Gwen Bagni, Paul Dubov, Harvey Bullock and R.S. Allen. Adding their bits to the busyness: John Findlater (as ‘Flip’, obnoxious oldest son), Alice Ghostley (funny as Abby’s housekeeper), Pat Carroll (the matchmaker sis), Herb Voland, Elaine Devry (a sexy married neighbor keen for Jake and not shy about it), Vic Tayback, Jamie Farr (leading the hippies, unbearable), Ken Osmond (25, two years before bagged showbiz and became a L.A. motorcycle cop), William Christopher, Milton Frome, Jackie Joseph, Peter Leeds and the The Grass Roots, as themselves; unfortunately they don’t get to sing their big hits “Let’s Live For Today” or “Midnight Confessions”. There’s a cute score from Robert Mersey.

* Burned out by the spate of mediocre scripts, the death of her husband and the major financial bind he’d left her in, Day quit the big screen but the late hubby (one Martin Melcher, boo/hiss) had secretly committed her to a five-year TV series, which started in Fall of 1968. She handled it like a pro. Keith, meanwhile, in between pictures good (The McKenzie Break) and bad (Krakatoa, East Of Java) was already stuck in the gooey TV series Family Affair, 138 episodes that ran from 1966 to 1971. A year later Hershey showed impressive dramatic mettle in the decidedly un-cute Last Summer.