Kindly but repressed school teacher Caroline Trewella (Glynis Johns) takes a trip to Cornwall to see the house she has inherited. It sits on top of a sea cave where a pair of mermaids frolic. The brighter of the two, Miranda (also Glynis Johns) shares a grandfather with Caroline—the two are doubles—and persuades her to go off on a bicycling trip so that she can act human for two weeks and have some fun. They bring in Nurse Carey (Margaret Rutherford), who Miranda had met some years earlier, to keep up the pretense and help hide her tail by claiming she’d been in an accident and can’t walk. Once ensconced in Caroline’s life, Miranda decides to help her relative by getting rid of her dull fiancée and finding her a better one from the local men.
Six years after Miranda thrilled the men of London, and audiences, in the self-titled Miranda, she returned for a sequel that again is charming. Nurse Carey is the only other returning character, bringing back the always wonderful Margaret Rutherford. The playwright behind the first is also back, though with a new director. The plot, as before, is slight, allowing the comedy to come from character interactions. Anyone who enjoyed the first will enjoy this one, and anyone who hasn’t seen the first should go grab that one immediately.
Everything isn’t the same. Mirada was shot in high contrast, lush, black & white. Mad About Men is in a pleasant but unspectacular color. It looks nice, particularly the ocean scenes, but is nothing special, and some prints have not been cared for and in those cases there’s a good deal of bleed and it can look garish. The risqué humor has been toned down, though our mermaid is still a party girl. The addition of her dim sidekick is a larger change in tone. She’s around for zany gags and while her jokes land more often than not, I could have done without her. We also have an unnecessary thriller element added, with Miranda in danger, that brings down the picture. I do not want to be worrying about Miranda. I want to watch the chaos she causes around her. The change makes this a sillier film, with less wit than the first.
Most of the film is sweet and breezy. The interaction between Miranda and Carey are amusing, particularly the suggestions of the nurse’s own wild past. The flirting is good fun, with all of the local men ready to jump into…wherever Miranda tells them to jump. Mad About Men doesn’t equal its prequel, but is a nice way to spend an afternoon.