Tammy (Debbie Reynolds, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN) is a seventeen year old girl living in the bayou with her moonshine-making lay preacher grandfather Reverend Dinwitty (Walter Brennan, RIO BRAVO). When a plane crashes, her grandfather gets the idea to visit the whirlpool looking for salvage. Tammy accompanies him and they discover Peter Brent (Leslie Nielsen, FORBIDDEN PLANET) unconscious and clinging to a tree branch. They take him home and Tammy nurses him back to health, quickly falling in love with him in ten days (five of which he spent in delirium). She is beyond devastated when he returns to the outside world. When grandpa is arrested and jailed for manufacturing corn liquor, she is sent to stay at Peter's family home of Brentwood where she predictably upsets and enlivens the household with her down-to-earth charm. Peter's mother Deena (Fay Wray, KING KONG) is the head of the temperance league, so she is understandably nonplussed to discover that Tammy's grandfather is in jail for bootlegging. His professor father Joel (Sidney Blackmer, ROSEMARY'S BABY) has retreated into his books and has been emotionally unavailable, and Peter's cat-obsessed aunt Renie (Mildred Natwick, THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY) thinks she is too old to live the Bohemian lifestyle she desires. Although Tammy has competition from Peter's fiancee Barbara (Mala Powers, RAGE AT DAWN) and has caught the attentions of Peter's amorous best friend Ernie (Craig Hill, ALL ABOUT EVE), her mouth is far more likely to get her into trouble than any machinations of Peter's family and friends.

Not Reynold's film debut, but her first starring role, TAMMY AND THE BACHELOR is harmless widescreen Technicolor comedy drama of pretty people in pretty clothes. Tammy's constant praising of the lord is a little grating, but Reynolds is charming and it is always a novelty to see Nielsen in a more straight-forward role. The other cast members and their characters are really given little to do, but their presences are nicely filled out by a charming supporting cast that also includes Philip Ober (NORTH BY NORTHWEST) as Barbara's business-minded uncle and Louisa Beavers (MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE) as Osia the temperamental cook. Unfortunately, the plot never takes up its potential melodramatic avenues. Two characters who would be schemers in any other romantic drama just waffle around in the background much of the time, and get off pretty easily in the end. The revelation of Tammy's jailed father making the papers is set up to figure into the climax, but it then receives only passing mention in the film's penultimate scene. Although the film is based on a novel called "Tammy Out of Time" all of the characters are living out of time here. Peter is the only one who seems concerned with the estate's money problems: we never see his professor father outside of the house's library or drawing room, Rennie owns the house but seems to be just visiting from no where in particular, his mother is more concerned with the prestige side of the pilgrimage than the profits, while Barbara and Ernie are not specified as social climbers or from similarly financially-hobbled Southern gentry, and the black cook's only concern about wearing a slave turban for the pilgrimage is that it is too hot). Everything is neatly wrapped up; although Tammy would return for three more adventures in TAMMY TELL ME TRUE and TAMMY AND THE DOCTOR (both times replaced by Sandra Dee), and TAMMY AND THE MILLIONAIRE (in which the lead was taken by Debbie Watson, who would also star in the short-lived television series version).