The Tunnel of Love is a 1958 American romantic comedy film directed by Gene Kelly and starring Doris Day and Richard Widmark.

Day received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her performance.

In Westport, Connecticut, Augie and Isolde Poole celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary by turning in an application to the Rock-a-Bye adoption agency.

Encouraged by their friends and next-door neighbors, Dick and Alice Pepper, who have three children and another due, Isolde, who has been unsuccessful in her attempts to become pregnant, is determined that she and Augie will eventually be parents.

While awaiting news of the application to the agency, Isolde decides that she and Augie should continue to try to have a baby on their own, and she enthusiastically follows all the latest advice by pregnancy experts.

One afternoon some weeks after their application, Estelle Novick (Gia Scala), a striking young investigator from Rock-a-Bye, visits the Pooles' neighborhood.

When Estelle comes to the Pooles' house, Augie is unaware of her identity and, believing she works for a local charity, drinks two cocktails and behaves casually.

Reminding the men that Dick is the Pooles' reference, Estelle waves aside their abject apologies and insists that she must report her findings to the agency.

Moments later, Estelle returns to the Pooles', apologizes for her severe behavior and accepts the cocktail Augie offered her earlier.

Augie visits Dick and confesses the incident with Estelle, from whom he has just received a call informing him that she is pregnant and leaving the area for her confinement.

Realizing that the couple is breaking up, she declares she must make a report to the agency, but Augie pleads for a week and Miss MacCracken agrees.

He had been looking for more opportunities to direct and new MGM chief (and Kelly fan) Benny Thau needed someone to tackle the film, so it was a beneficial collaboration for both of them.

Thau stipulated that Kelly had to make the movie in black and white, using only one primary set, shoot it in just three weeks and for a cost of less than $500,000.

In the play, Estelle seduces Augie intentionally in order to get pregnant so that she might experience firsthand the plight of unwed mothers, the topic of her PhD thesis, which, as in the film, she reveals she is working on part-time.

Strangely enough, the movie includes a puzzling scene between Richard Widmark and Gia Scala (Miss Novick) during their drive to a restaurant.

[1] In a 1958 New York Times review, Bosley Crowther wrote "OH, what they say, those shameless people, in M-G-M's "The Tunnel of Love," a comedy that bores through the shifty sands of wedlock in modern suburbia!