Cinema: Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?

In eight states and parts of Canada, on the evening of Nov. 9, 1965, lights started to flicker and fade. The Big Blackout had begun. Before the Northeast groped its way back to normalcy, more than 4,000,000 man-hours of productivity were lost. The total is incomplete; it cannot be fully tabulated until Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? ends its run. Figure 1½ wasted man-hours per viewing.

Like the actual event on which it is tenuously based, the picture begins brightly. A company treasurer (Robert Morse) is in the process of absconding to Brazil with the company funds when the power failure overtakes him at the scene of the crime. He quickly gloms an abandoned auto from a traffic jam and heads for Boston, where an airport is still functioning. But he gets only as far as the exurbs.

End of the comic promise and beginning of a vapid farce of mistaken-identity crises. Morse's co-star is Doris Day, playing a pulpy, gulpy Broadway actress named Margaret Garrison, whose bed he blunders into by mistake. To disarm audiences—and possibly critics—she sometimes refers to herself as the Constant Virgin, a sobriquet Doris has actually earned in half a dozen previous films, pursued by the likes of Gary Grant and Rock Hudson but remaining a freckle-faced iron maiden to the fadeout. In this picture, she is equipped with a husband (Patrick O'Neal), but by pouting continually, she keeps him at arm's length. Morse, drugged on her sleeping potion, never gets to make anything but frantic motions. Thus if she is no longer precisely virginal, she remains constant.

Doris Day fans, if there are any left, would be better off waiting for her new situation-comedy series on TV this fall. At worst, it will be only half a man-hour wasted.