EDITOR’S NOTE: The Glass Bottom Boat was one of the first movies on the CBS Late Movie, airing on February 17, 1972. It also aired on July 31, 1972; February 19 and November 5, 1973 and March 12, 1976.

Also known as The Spy in Lace Panties, this movie teams up animator-turned-director Frank Tashlin (who made one of my favorite movies of all time, The Girl Can’t Help It) and star Doris Day, who gets to sing, of course, but also gets pulled into a spy plot. It was written by Everett Freeman, who also was the writer of The Maltese Bippy.

Day plays Jennifer Nelson, a widow who is helping her father (Arthur Godfrey) in his tourism business by dressing as a mermaid and swimming under his glass bottom boats. One day, she’s accidentally caught by Bruce Templeton (Rod Taylor) while he’s fishing; the embarrassment of her being nearly nude in front of him is compounded when she realizes that he works at her new position of employment, an aerospace research company.

Bruce’s new project is GISMO, a gravity system, and he also hires her to write his biography. But really, in truth, he just wants to get with her. Jennifer also meets Julius Pritter (Dom DeLuise), a spy struggling to install a stereo in Bruce’s futuristic apartment while gathering info on him, and Edgar Hill (Eric Fleming), a CIA agent protecting Bruce and GISMO.

Love blooms, as it does in romantic comedies, but the issue is that Hill, security guard Homer Cripps (Paul Lynde!) and PR executive Zack Molloy (Dick Martin!) believe that Jennifer is a spy. Why would she call the same phone number multiple times a day and simply hang up after saying, “That’s enough, Vlamdir?”

Well, Vladmir isn’t some Russian boss. It’s her dog. And the only exercise he gets all day while she works is running around the apartment mad at the ringing phone. Of course, as happens in these movies, Bruce screws up when he says that she isn’t smart enough to be a spy. She overhears and decides to act as if she is a spy. Hijinks at a party ensue, but all works out well by the end.

TV lovers: Norman and Mabel Fenimore (George Tobias and Alice Pearce) are pretty much the same characters that Tobias and Pearce played on Bewitched. There’s also a great Robert Vaughn cameo where he briefly appears and the theme from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is heard on the soundtrack. Speaking of that show, the ultra-technological apartment of Templeton was recycled as the evil spy base on a two-part episode of that show, “The Concrete Overcoat Affair.”

Day only made four more movies after this — including the pure spy movie Caprice with Tashlin — before starting what many would come to know her best for, The Doris Day Show. She sings the song that was that show’s theme, “Que Sera Sera,” as she also did in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.