This film is misleadingly named (and not to be confused with one of our favorite criminally underappreciated animated films). It sounds like it's going to be a To Sir With Love kind of classroom-centered thing, but in fact it's mostly about the newspaper business. It's a better film than A Touch of Mink, and Doris Day is better served by it (she plays a competent university instructor rather than a ditsy nobody from Sandusky), but I don't much like Clark Gable in it. Once again, Gig Young (why have I never heard of this person before now?) steals it, though. As Jami pointed out, Gable's character is as if It Happened One Night never happened to his character from that film, and he stayed in the newspaper biz. He is James Gannon, a crusty city editor on the New York Chronicle (or some such invented paper), while she is Erica Stone, an instructor teaching a night class at CUNY (?) who has invited him to give a guest lecture, to which he has responded with a rude letter about how you can't teach journalism, you have to live it, and he doesn't even have a high school diploma. Despite this, he is called in by his boss and told he has to go. When he shows up to her class, he is first amazed to find out that she's a woman (he only had her initials given to him before) and second that she is such a young, attractive woman (albeit, as usual, saddled with an incredibly dowdy (to my eyes) hairdo, as was always Doris Day's fate). He hasn't had a chance to introduce himself before she reads his letter to the class and then proceeds to describe how she imagines him (and gets it so alarmingly right that he hides his hat, because it fits her description too well). He slips out, but broods on this encounter and decides that he will sign up for her class and show her up. So he shows up to her class, calls himself "Jim Gallagher,"
and, although he has shown up late, asks to have the chance to produce a piece of writing to be critiqued, as with all the other students. She gives him an actual incident that has just happened (a murder committed by a young Puerto Rican) and tells him to write 250 words on it. In no time flat he knocks out 150 words and expects to hear her wrongheaded critique of what he knows is a top-notch piece of newspaper writing. He is a little taken aback when she recognizes its worth and explains it to the class, and still further taken aback when she adopts him as her star pupil and tries to encourage this self-professed employee of a wallpaper company to consider going into journalism. But he is reassured again in her eggheadedness when she insists that his journalism is a bit old-fashioned, and what is really needed are thinkpieces, that explain the "why" of incidents like the murder he wrote about. (He is particularly annoyed when an old employee of his newsroom seems to confirm the public interest in these questions, as he says repeatedly (of a bomb threat) "I keep asking myself "why"?") Being a sexist old bachelor, he is keen to move in on his doting professor,
but is finds that she is always having meetings with a famous Psychology professor, Dr. Hugo Pine, whom her secretary (who works nights - this struck me as implausible) informs him "has the inside track". He ends up encountering Pine (who is Gig Young, and is the best character in the film) and Erica when they show up at the nightclub he's at with his girlfriend (Mamie Van Doren, a performer in said nightclub, and an example of the usual, let's say, uncomplicated women he goes for). While she goes off to get ready to perform, he joins Erica and Hugo at their table and tries to prove that Pine is only good at being an egghead (something he knows because he ordered his books to research him and discovered that there are piles of them, despite the fact that Pine is young and dishy). To his increasing dismay, he finds out that Pine is not only charming, he knows everything about everything, including baseball trivia, war trivia (he served) and Watusi drum rhythms.
Added to this that Erica gets to witness an embarrassing performance by the girlfriend (which you absolutely have to watch) and Gannon is distinctly out of sorts. So much so that he bribes the waiter (while Pine is demonstrating his skill at dancing) to spike Pine's drink. This appears to have no effect, while Gannon gets more and more plastered, until Pine reveals that he researched inebriation and trained himself so he is immune to its effects. At least he is until he goes outside and takes a deep breath, whereupon he passes out instantly, and Gannon and Erica have to take him home and tuck him in, in the process of which she reveals that she isn't in love with him, she's just working on a book with him, about her father, who was "the editor of a small country newspaper". They go to her place and she is making fun of his girlfriend's performance (remember, Doris Day started out as a big band singer, so she's no slouch) when he discovers that her father is a famous former winner of a Pulitzer, and someone he has idolized. He feels ashamed and ducks out while she is looking for food in the fridge. And the next day he shows up to Pine's place to ask for his advice, and is surprised at how well they get along (despite Pine's titanic hangover).
As you can imagine, eventually she discovers his deception, before he can reveal it himself, and the love she had started to feel for him evaporates. Pine attempts a reconciliation, because Gannon has lost all confidence in his work, but then recovers it when reading the newspaper her father wrote and discovers that, although he was a great editorial writer, he was a terrible newspaper man. The film ends with them reconciling, each having learned something from the other, but not necessarily in a relationship, which was sort of refreshing. All-in-all, a very good plot, some social commentary (if a bit crude), and characters who continually surprise you, which is a sign of good writing. Gable is a bit of a caricature, and does a fair bit of eye-bugging, but he is perfectly believable as a crusty newspaperman with a soft center (see the subplot about Barney, his young would-be-protege), and as I said, Gig Young is great.
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