Review of Top Secret Affair

I first saw this picture on television around 1970, in the middle of the Vietnam War, and found it confusing to my early teen sensibilities. Here were Kirk Douglas and Susan Hayward playing everything straight, yet it was supposed to be a "comedy," and a romantic comedy at that -- instead the plot lurched back and forth, mostly built around the Hayward character's alternating hate-love-hate-love feelings toward ramrod straight two-star general Kirk Douglas (who was specifically depicted as no desk-jockey, but a highly decorated combat officer, now moving on to a prominent administrative post). There are some strained attempts at humor involving the two leads, but what humor there is comes mostly courtesy of Jim Backus as a put-upon colonel in public relations and Paul Stewart as Hayward's one almost co-equal confidante. And if that were all there were to this movie (which started out as a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall), if would be a mildly amusing feature. But woven into the story is an absolutely savage look at the nature of the post-war press corps -- and publishers who think they can influence presidents and Congress -- and a tacit widespread suspicion of (if not outright hatred for) the military, doubly so from the members of the US Senate who are depicted (principally a fatuous, headline-hunting committee chairman played by Roland Winters). It was all difficult for me to understand in 1970, and having seen it again in 2018, I still can't figure out what the writers and producers had in mind for "entertainment," or if they were onto something about our society, or they were just telling a story with no relationship to reality. And if this is an accurate portrayal of where we were in this country in the second half of the 1950s, then perhaps we almost deserved the rot that would set in during the 1960s.