mystery before moving on to Warner Brothers, where he wrote Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946), a comedy that featured Jack Carson, one of the four main performers in Romance. It would be almost a decade before Diamond's career finally clicked—when he was introduced to director Billy Wilder. That meeting began a successful movie partnership that lasted many years. Reception Box office According to Warner Bros records the film earned $2,200,000 domestically and $1,025,000 foreign. Criticisms and appraisals Doris Day's motion picture premiere did not impress Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who wrote that Day "has no more than a vigorous disposition which hits the screen like a thud." As for the movie itself, Crowther found it "a scatterbrained comedy of errors." An anonymous review in small-town Texas newspaper The Kaufman Herald, published in late 1948, asserted that "seldom does a film musical come along which gives all of its stars a chance to shine so much... Miss Day impresses for her ease and command before the cameras. Her song delivery is neat, and she is able to wear costumes smartly." Another rural Texas publication, The Hearne Democrat, called it "a rib-tickling musical that is full of laughs all the way." In his laudatory review of a live singing performance by Doris Day at the Gregory Gym in Austin, Texas in the winter of 1949, entertainment critic Steve Perkins of the Austin American-Statesman reminded his readers of the rave review of Romance he had written the previous summer through the following excerpt: "A new leading lady has popped up out of nowhere and it will probably be a long time before she pops down again. Doris Day, who had already achieved a small measure of fame with dance bands and on records, is a vocalist who can act, sing sweet and look pretty all at the same time." In later years, Village Voice critic, Molly Haskell, asserted that "whenever I remember [Doris Day's] roles...it is as one of the few movie heroines who had to work for a living." In Romance on the High Seas, Day's first film character, Georgia Garrett, is indeed a poor, working-class chanteuse whose favorite pastime is dreaming of ocean voyages she thinks she'll never enjoy. Writing for Film Comment magazine in 2007, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert called Day's work in this film "a doughy debut as a gum-smacking honky-tonk singer" and claims her real "movie persona