Teacher's Pet - 1958

First-class production values and Clark Gable barking his lines like it’s 1934 help keep this two-hour comedy moving forward. For much of the first half, it’s almost all Gable in the role of James Gannon, managing editor of a daily newspaper, along with some scenes of Doris Day as a night school journalism teacher lecturing her students. The publisher of the newspaper where Gannon works wants him to go guest-lecture at the newspaper class to give them insight on the less theoretical aspects of the business.

Gannon, angry about the assignment, initially visits her class intending to tell the teacher off, intending to dismiss her teaching as nonsense and useless theory and to flatly state the only education a real newspaperman needs comes from hard won experience. But instead, he sizes her up, listens to her speak to the class, then thinks better of his plan, and sits down, fascinated. He then concocts a cover story to hide his real identity.

She becomes equally fascinated that this older student seems to have an unmatched natural talent for journalism, completely unaware he’s the seasoned managing editor of a large staff, looming like an emperor with his sleeves rolled up from a long table in the middle of a jammed newsroom. Between shouting out split-second orders and speed-reading through soon to be published copy, he grinds the whole staff through the every-second-counts method of getting out a daily paper. But aspects of her night class on the subject of journalism catch his curiosity, besides the point driven home by the film's director (George Seaton) that the gruff newspaperman finds the night class teacher extremely attractive.

Though a comedy, both Gable and Day take their parts seriously at times as legitimate characters in unique non-comedy situations. Beneath the gags and the somewhat familiar routine of mistaken identity, the story explores (written by Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin) the value of education and the peculiar situation of a professional expert in a field being thrust into exploring the fundamentals of his discipline from an angle he never considered.

Gig Young appears as a university professor named Hugo Pine, who at first comes across as something like a superman. He’s a psychologist fluent in multiple languages, a world traveller, the author of numerous books, capable of rattling off facts like a ticker tape, and seemingly a master of an endless array of skills. He’s also assisting Doris Day’s character with writing a book. When Clark Gable’s character sees them together at a nightclub, where he is cozily seated with Mamie Van Doren (as nightclub entertainer Peggy DeFore), he quickly concludes that, if he’s interested in the lady professor, Gig Young’s imposing psychologist is his immediate competition. Thus begins a funny game of one-upmanship.

Partly a comedy about how an old dog learns new tricks, Teacher's Pet also serves as a straightforward vehicle for Clark Gable to portray an older version of the fast-talking, hard-boiled reporter archetype he won an Oscar for in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). But the film isn’t without its problems. Inserting a more sophisticated and illuminated understanding of the role and possibilities of journalism into Teacher's Pet jars a little against the comedy which is goofy and exaggerated like many romantic comedies of the era. At other times this duality modulates seamlessly and makes me wish they could have carried it further with a better exploration of that giant newsroom teaming with character actors.

Another problem is the noticeable age gap between Gable and Doris Day. This wouldn't be an issue if the story acknowledged it in some way, but instead, the story implies that Gable, Gig Young, and Day are all contemporaries in terms of maturity, which is fine as far as dialogue and the story goes, but is visually unconvincing.

At the time of filming, Gable was nearing the end of his life; he would die in 1960 after two heart attacks just eleven days apart. In Teacher's Pet, he often appears jowly and puffy, and with hindsight, there’s a kind of John Barrymore effect — much like watching Barrymore in his final films, you can see the deterioration in progress. As Gable smokes his way through the movie, lighting one cigarette after another (with one particular lighter even playing a part in the plot), you feel like yelling at the screen, “Clark, stop it! It’s no good for ya!”

Gig Young plays his psychologist character "straight" for a good stretch of the film, but eventually, small eccentricities begin to surface, though nothing approaching the scale of neurosis he portrayed in Touch of Mink (1962), also with Day. Young is a good match for Gable, and in a twist that helps to refresh this two-hour comedy, his psychologist character ends up coaching the frustratingly love-struck old newspaperman through rapid-fire growing-up therapy. This is so that Gannon the Managing Editor will have a fighting chance with the deeply offended lady professor, who by that point has uncovered the ruse played on her by her talented amateur "student."

Doris Day has limited space in Teacher's Pet to fully showcase her talents, but she is a good comedy sparring partner for Gable and she does get to pirate Van Doren's rendition of "I’m the Girl Who Invented Rock and Roll" and transforms it into a funny song parody. She also executes what seems to be her main purpose in the story, to cause Gable’s character to grind away in perplexity. The sophisticated, refined world of education that Managing Editor Gannon has long detested suddenly begins to look appealing with Doris Day as it's exponent.

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Original Page September 3, 2025