Martin plays Jason Steel, a very popular actor on a television medical drama who breaks off his engagement to Mellisa Morris (Elizabeth Montgomery). Mellisa turns to her friend Stella (Burnett), a secretary at a psychiatrists' office, for help in getting him back. The plot involved psychoanalysis, then en vogue in romantic comedies of the late 1950s/early 1960s, where all problems could be conquered on the couch and the love birds reunited at the fadeout.
This was Dean Martin's third and final film working with director Daniel Mann who seemed happy just to let Martin do his own thing, which proved to be the wrong approach as William Schoell wrote in his biography of Martin, "As sex farces go, Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? was fair to middling with some genuinely amusing moments amid others that were mostly smarmy and foolish. Dean got good notices, however; typical of them was Variety's noting that "Martin is an amiable performer in light comedy and does fine with the material at hand." But they, and others, felt one bit was particularly tasteless: "Disagreeable is a scene in which Martin graphically demonstrates on his analyst's couch his anxiety about a gal," with Dean's words and movements being a little too licentious. Dean himself had trouble playing this scene and repeatedly and atypically messed up his lines, only because he wasn't certain if he was going over the top or not, and director Mann, willing to let him have his way, wasn't advising one way or the other."
The New York Times disagreed with Variety , 'Here's a fair warning to parents: don't get the happy idea that Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? is a film about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It is not a picture for children. Nor is it for adults, I would say. It might be a picture for grown-ups with very simple minds. [...] Dean Martin plays the fellow, and the best I can say for him is that he seems to realize that his talents for this kind of flimflam are no better than Jack Rose's script. He doesn't even bother to speak good English, which may be his subtle way of commenting on the cultivation of actors on video."
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? was exactly what it set out to be: a fluffy comedy that audiences could enjoy and then forget about. And that is how it figured in the careers of its stars.
Producer: Jack Rose
Director: Daniel Mann
Screenplay: Jack Rose
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art Direction: Arthur Lonergan, Hal Pereira
Music: George Duning
Film Editing: George Tomasini
Cast: Dean Martin (Jason Steel), Elizabeth Montgomery (Mellisa Morris), Carol Burnett (Stella), Martin Balsam (Sanford Kaufman), Jill St. John (Toby Tobler), Richard Conte (Leonard Ashley), Macha Meril (Jacqueline Edwards), Louis Nye (Harry Tobler), Yoko Tani (Isami Hiroti), Jack Soo (Yoshimi Hiroti), Dianne Foster (Mona Kaufman), Elliott Reid (Tom Edwards), Johnny Silver (Charlie, houseboy), Elisabeth Fraser (Dora Ashley).
C-103m.
by Lorraine LoBiano
SOURCES:
Martini Man: The Life of Dean Martin by William Schoell
The New York Times film review by Bosley Crowther, December 26, 1963
The AFI Catalog of Feature Films
