Nebbish comedian Tommy Noonan (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) stretches to play a nebbish actor named Tommy Noonan. He’s unemployed, too, until he’s hired by high-class stripper Saxie Symbol (Mamie Van Doren, Sex Kittens Go to College) for an unusual weekly gig: to go to the psychiatrist for her and her two platonic roomies, narcissistic model Bruce (John Cronin, Twist Around the Clock) and car salesman Joe (Paul Gilbert, Women of the Prehistoric Planet).
See, shrink appointments are cost-prohibitive, and Saxie, Bruce and Joe reason that if they relay their neuroses to Tommy, he can attend for all of them. (Why they need to hire him at $60 a week when one of them could do the same would be a gaping plot hole, but that requires plot.) Tommy agrees and plops upon the couch of psychiatrist Dr. Myra Von (Ziva Rodann, Pharaoh’s Curse) to spend 20 minutes on the problems of each of his employers. However, being an actor, Tommy does so while imitating their voices and mannerisms, thus leading Dr. Von to see him as a special kind of schizophrenic: one worth studying. Don’t ask, but an incident involving a nudie magazine and spilled coffee causes their closed-circuit session to hit boob tubes nationwide, instantly vaulting Tommy to national celebrity status.
Are you laughing yet? You won’t. Directed and co-written by Noonan as a follow-up to Promises! Promises!, his 1963 hit with Jayne Mansfield, 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt is a sex comedy that has aged so poorly, no discernible laughs remain — and that’s assuming it had any with which to begin. Given the lack of permissiveness of the times, it also has no sex. Sure, MVD is sexy AF, and Noonan’s camera offers peekaboo glimpses of her famous bosom, including a scene that finds the starlet literally bathing in beer. As with her striptease numbers, this sequence is lovingly rendered in color, whereas the bulk of the picture was shot in much cheaper black-and-white stock.
Playing less like a movie and more like a wish-fulfillment fantasy for its creator, 3 Nuts is not the sharpest tool in the sex-comedy shed. While harmless, it also is utterly charmless. Arguably, the most interesting about it is that its production design is credited to one Carroll Ballard, future director of the G-rated future-glue movie The Black Stallion! —Rod Lott