Peter Tewksbury's Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding 1967

Still, Tewksbury has persevered with his pleasantness, and such perseverance should be both recorded and rewarded.
--Andrew Sarris

I hadn't thought about Tewksbury in some time (he died in 2003) and then came Jill Lepore's article in The New Yorker (Nov. 21, 2016) about Tewksbury's attempt to make a film from J.D. Salinger's story "For Esme With Love and Squalor", and a showing last week of Tewksbury's Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding on Turner Classic Movies.  I also watched the first of the 134 episodes that Tewksbury directed of Father Knows Best (which ran from 1954 to 1960, from when I was seven to thirteen):  Lesson in Citizenhip.

Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding is a good example of the confusion of the mid-sixties, though it in no way transcends the period.  Tewksbury is trying to help Dee escape from her Tammy and Gidget roles, about which she was always ambivalent.  At one point Dee's boss, played by George Hamilton, tells her she is too "wholesome" and she responds with "what a rotten thing to say."  Dee tries to be sexy and pursue a singing career, with the help of her mother, and takes up serious drinking (something Dee herself had trouble with all her life) but then becomes pregnant, the fireworks going off when she kisses Hamilton.  Dee has three suitors (played by Bill Bixby, Dwayne Hickman and Bill Kalmen) who all want to marry her but her mother (played by Celeste Holm who, along with Allen Jenkins as an agent, represents a link to classic Hollywood) beats them off with a toilet plunger.  The film is best described as "sixties garish," though this seems to be a deliberate choice by Tewksbury and cinematographer Fred Konecamp (who also did Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, 1970), with bright orange being the main and most intense color in the crowded widescreen image.

Sandra Dee started beautifully in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) but seldom worked with directors of that quality afterwards.  Tewksbury got nowhere with his movie of a Salinger story.  Salinger's stories did not easily transfer to film and he was bitter about Mark Robson's The Foolish Heart (1949), actually a pretty okay Mark Robson film, though it did not follow Salinger's "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" particularly closely.  Tewksbury remained comfortable in television, as Lesson in Citizenship shows a skillful ability to portray a complicated plot with subtle and delicate touches, in 22 minutes.