Richard Morris's script [for Thoroughly Modern Millie] … is clever enough, though it merely strings together jokes on flat-chested rich girls, Harold Lloyd movies, innocents in the big city, Victorian melodrama. Somebody spent a lot of time researching all of the expressions from the twenties that sound ever so cute now, but nobody worried much about wit…. In its parody of old-fashioned movie Romance Millie is especially delightful, and promising…. But this is only one target of the movie's burlesque, and not all of them are so rewarding. As musical spectacle the film disappoints. The songs themselves—mostly retrieved from the period and nicely lampooned—are pleasant, but the choreography is insipid, and both the color photography and settings are thoroughly ordinary. George Roy Hill's direction is consistently unimaginative. (pp. 61-2)

Stephen Farber, in his review of "Thoroughly Modern Millie," in Film Quarterly (© 1967 by The Regents of the University...