Doris Day and James Garner at their best in classic comedy

MOVE OVER, DARLING Great Movies Classic

Monday, 9pm

DORIS Day was seen as an actor who singlehandedly invented virginity and made a career of playing creatures so wholesome they came with an FDA label attached to their peach, or pale lemon twinset.

But not always. Day had hinted at fun lustfulness in films such as Pillow Talk, in which she and Rock Hudson took part in what is almost phone sex.

Now, in 1963, the counterculture was beginning to arrive. JFK had been assassinated. Martin Luther King was telling the world of his dream and The Beatles brought with them long-haired insouciance.

And finally, Doris Day had a chance to play a role closer to her own reality; a sex goddess dressed up as the girl next door. Not a sex bomb like Monroe, or a Bardot – yet someone with sizzling on-screen potency. The plot of Move Over, Darling – a remake of the 1940s screwball comedy My Favourite

Wife – tells of Ellen (Day) whom we learn has been presumed dead after a plane crash and lost at sea.

After five years of searching, her husband Nick (James Garner) gives up all hope and sets about marrying Bianca (Polly Bergin).

However, Ellen isn’t dead at all. She’s been stranded on a desert island and when she finally escapes to civilisation does her very best to wreck her husband’s new relationship.

The fun begins as Day’s character does her very best to convince Nick that she is in fact the one that he wants – and uses every feminine wile she can muster. But there’s a complication.

Ellen was not stranded on a desert island alone. Indeed, she had the company of tall, handsome Stephen (Chuck Connors) and we’re under no illusion that Stephen hadn’t spent his nights listening to Ellen sing Que Sera, Sera.

The idea for the film wasn’t original, apart from My Favourite Wife. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Enoch Arden told of a ‘dead’ man who returns to find his wife married to his friend and rival.

And indeed, the film studio had attempted the same story with Monroe.

(But odds are, she didn’t have Day’s range, nor the daring and toughness to sell a screwball comedy with powerful themes of bigamy, and pragmatism and the notion that sexual dynamics can’t be defined, but are ultimately important in what makes couples couple.)

Regardless, this version sees Day and Garner at their sexually-charged best.