HotToastyRag In the groundbreaking romantic drama, Doris Day and Richard Widmark can't have children, and not for lack of trying. Gene Kelly directs this drama that touches on some untouched topics in 1958. In the good ol' days, there was a blackout after a wedding scene and the next shot opened on a bassinet. Now, in the last years of the Hays Code, Doris and Dick openly discuss ovulation cycles, how to track them, and what to do when it's the right time. It was very scandalous at the time.When the gorgeous couple get fed up with waiting for nature to give them a child, they decide to adopt-but how will they cope when the equally gorgeous Gia Scala enters their lives? While the second half of the movie gets a little silly, the first half is very fun to watch. Doris and Dick have great chemistry together, and it's always a treat to watch an old movie in which a married couple has realistic problems. It wasn't very often that classic movies mentioned adoption, surrogacy, and infertility, let alone made an entire movie about them. Plus, through a career playing bad guys and never getting the girl, it's nice that Richard Widmark is the hero of the story, and he starts out already having the girl!

writtenbymkm-583-902097 I'm going to skip the movie's plot details, most of you have already read the other reviews and/or seen the movie and know what it's about. What many of have also done is to see/take the movie completely out of context. For this you can be forgiven, unless you (a) grew up in the 1950s and/or (b) know who Peter De Vries was and/or (c) read his novel THE TUNNEL OF LOVE. De Vries was a successful writer of satire, on the staff of The New Yorker for some time, and wrote lots of satirical novels, including this one, first published in 1954, sharply poking fun at sophisticated sexual and social mores. The novel is set in Westport, Connecticut, where De Vries lived, and its depiction of sexual double standards, social life, euphemisms, booze, etc., is typical of the time period. A stage version was produced in 1957, and presumably to "water it down" a little for theater audiences, the ending was changed, which basically ruined the story. A year later the Doris Day/Richard Widmark movie version came out, using the play's watered-down feel-good ending and destroying the novel's biting satire. So if you regard this movie out of the context of its novel and its time period, you might be confused or disappointed.

blanche-2 1958 was before Ross Hunter embarked Doris Day on the fabulous career she had in the '60s, in which she would become a top box office draw - in fact, THE box office drawer for years. In "The Tunnel of Love," she plays a sweet, vivacious woman who is desperate to have a baby and can't, so she and her husband, played by Richard Widmark, plan to adopt one. When the adopted baby bears a strong resemblance to Widmark, he becomes sure that the child is the result of an evening he can't remember with the investigative social worker (Gia Scala).Based on a play, this kind of light, subtly sexual comedy became very popular on the dinner theater circuit in the '60s and '70s, joining the ranks of "Mary, Mary", "The Marriage Go Round," "Boeing Boeing," etc. It is not particularly well directed by Gene Kelly and sports the very strange casting of Richard Widmark as Day's confused husband. I can't agree with the comments here. Though an actor known for playing tough roles and cruel men, he does a credible job here mainly because he knows enough not to play for laughs. He creates a full character, that of a caring if foolish man who adores his wife but screws up occasionally. Gig Young plays the philandering husband next door. He's fine, but the character is very unlikable.There's not really much to recommend here. I suppose at the time it was considered somewhat suggestive, but it doesn't play well today.

Angus T. Cat I saw this movie on TV when I was young, about ten or eleven. I thought then it was funny and adult in the sense of being a bit dirty and knowing. I saw it again yesterday. I am now between thirty and death too. "The Tunnel of Love" is a time capsule, but a bemusing one. The humour is degrading to the female characters, especially the wife trying to get pregnant, the constantly pregnant wife next door, and the adoption agency investigator who is immediately judged by her looks. I felt with the investigator when she complained to the husband that Gig Young's character made a pass at her five minutes after meeting her. Almost as bad as the nudge nudge pinch pinch attitude of the neighbor and his advice that his happily married friend should bag a babe is the total lack of common sense in the characters' actions. Why does the insulted investigator drive back to make her own pass at the husband? Why does the husband conclude that he has fathered the investigator's baby when it turns out that she is married? (And before this is revealed at the end, the audience and the husband haven't got a clue that the investigator has a husband herself.)Why does the husband give her a check for a thousand dollars without asking her more questions- like how he can be be so certain that he's the one who got her pregnant? Why is the wife next door constantly getting "off to the races" if the husband's sole contribution to parenthood is telling their kids to shut up before he ships them off to boarding school? If you're fascinated by 50s attitudes toward sex, "The Tunnel of Love" is a revealing portrait of the sort of humour that the artist character might highlight in a cartoon to sell to Playboy or one of the more downmarket men's magazines of the era. Behind the winking and the flirting of the actress in the party scene there's a stream of melancholy, especially in the story of the West Point student in his second year whose family has decided that he will marry his pregnant girlfriend: as Gig Young snaps, he'll have bars on his shoulders and a toddler in his lap. All those martinis and double whiskies and Young's box of tranquilizers that he pops like popcorn point at the terror and sadness behind the whoopie. The husband's dinner with the investigator says it all: he has a bottle of ale and a lamb chop from the children's menu. All of the characters are children themselves. Thank God times have changed.