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In order to properly appreciate Blake Edwards' Operation Petticoat, or understand why it has endured in popularity for more than 40 years, one must first accept that it's a much more complicated movie than it seems. For starters, though it is set in December of 1941 and January of 1942, its plot and sensibilities are really much more reflective of postwar America; and it's also two very different kinds of comedy within one movie, each overlaying the other and working in tandem during the last 70 minutes of its two-hour running time. The first half of Operation Petticoat is an amusing service comedy that builds slowly and subtly in its intensity, playing off of Cary Grant's wry persona and his character's exasperation (really a very slow burn) over the situation in which he finds himself, stuck with a damaged submarine in the middle of a war that broke out only days earlier; and the Tony Curtis character's mix of foppish ne'er-do-well and knowing conniver/scrounger. That half of the movie is something seen before, albeit not done in quite as relaxed a manner, in the comical elements of John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy's Mister Roberts (1954) and Richard Quine's Operation Mad Ball (1957). Then, in the second half of the movie, the stranded army nurses come aboard the submarine Sea Tiger, and suddenly, in the wink of an eye, Operation Petticoat switches gears as director, script, and cast all open the throttle at once -- all of its cylinders start firing, and the movie blossoms into a much more complex and daring piece of entertainment and humor, concerning the close-quarter mingling of the sexes. This being a 1959 movie, it was impossible for Russell Harlan's camera not to linger on the ****** physiques of Dina Merrill, Joan O'Brien et al -- audiences expected it and, indeed, the studio making the movie would have demanded it; but those shots, and the dialogue and plot developments that go with them, linger more than they leer, and come with a fairly sophisticated purpose. The whole second half of Operation Petticoat is a sly look at late 1950's concepts of male and female sexuality, reveling in them on the one hand and cheerfully satirizing them on the other. Faced with sharing very tight quarters with a group of nubile women, Grant's and Curtis's characters (and, to a lesser degree, Arthur O'Connell's engine room chief and Dick Sargent's junior officer, and the rest of the crew) must grope -- and this reviewer uses that term in the least ****** manner possible -- around the recesses of their own masculinity and its motivations, to come to terms with their new living situation. In many ways, the movie brushes up against the same material targeted by Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (also starring Curtis), with Joan O'Brien furnishing the iconic female form (and cute, if less distinctive, personality) that Marilyn Monroe provided in the Wilder movie. The movie has a good time tweaking the more frivolous sides of femininity as it was understood in 1959; it also targets several aspects of male sexuality of the period, most importantly the misogynist mentalities of older men embodied by Grant's and O'Connell's characters, and their distrust of women, as well as the "****** magazine"-style hedonism embodied by Curtis's character -- it even manages to work in a gentle dig at the go-getter, success-at-any-price ideas that afflicted America in the 1950's. In the end, the Sea Tiger's loopy, halting ride across the Pacific becomes a much smoother, more subtle, and enjoyable ride for the viewer, who can absorb Operation Petticoat at its most superficial, or find amusement at deeper and more serious levels. Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide