How to Murder Your Wife (1965)
Jack Lemmon is sharp and almost single handedly keeps this deliberate farce from falling completely apart. It's a slick production, very well filmed, but it's also mindlessly sexist from our point of view, and downright stupid at times, too, for other reasons.
That's why a lot of people like it. This is really the flip side to the 1960s, pre-Woodstock. As a kind of set-up for this you might watch the truly amazing 1960 Jack Lemmon movie, "The Apartment," which has different stylistic intentions but has an odd overlap in plot. In both movies Lemmon plays a bachelor in corporate America when a woman unexpectedly enters his life, and his living space.
But how different could two movies be in how this is handled? The earlier one, a masterpiece by Billy Wilder, is about both the shenanigans of the white collar set, and the boorish sexism they drag with them and about an alternative, in Lemmon's character, finding genuine human affection and standing up for what he feels. In this later movie Lemmon's character is just as silly as his peers, and the scenes are variations of girl watching and comic sexing up of this man's manly world.
Granted, this is a comedy, and a clever one. The odd hook is our hero is a popular comic strip artist, and when he gets an idea he enacts it in detail with his butler taking pictures of the scenes. That way he gets fresh ideas on how to illustrate the crazy events, but of course he also has to pretend to do some crazy stuff in public. It's pretty hilarious on that level, and when the problem of the woman enters the equation, he tries to turn it into material for his comics. That works for awhile.
The actors around Lemmon are not all convincing, though his butler is rather wonderfully affected. The women, not surprisingly, are all pretty shallow and decorative, the main one being a true Italian import, the actress Virna Lisi, who thankfully did mostly Italian movies before drifting into television. She is meant to be a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and does pretty well at it, but you do wonder what we need a Marilyn Monroe look-alike for three years after her death.
Anyway, this kind of movie is an acquired taste, and I'm drifting more and more away from this style, having seen a dozen or so in the last few months. Luckily the Netflix version is nice and sharp and is full widescreen. I just can't do as another reviewer wrote, "I laugh I lust," and so I'm maybe unqualified to enjoy this movie, whatever its comedic charms.
Jack Lemmon is sharp and almost single handedly keeps this deliberate farce from falling completely apart. It's a slick production, very well filmed, but it's also mindlessly sexist from our point of view, and downright stupid at times, too, for other reasons.
That's why a lot of people like it. This is really the flip side to the 1960s, pre-Woodstock. As a kind of set-up for this you might watch the truly amazing 1960 Jack Lemmon movie, "The Apartment," which has different stylistic intentions but has an odd overlap in plot. In both movies Lemmon plays a bachelor in corporate America when a woman unexpectedly enters his life, and his living space.
But how different could two movies be in how this is handled? The earlier one, a masterpiece by Billy Wilder, is about both the shenanigans of the white collar set, and the boorish sexism they drag with them and about an alternative, in Lemmon's character, finding genuine human affection and standing up for what he feels. In this later movie Lemmon's character is just as silly as his peers, and the scenes are variations of girl watching and comic sexing up of this man's manly world.
Granted, this is a comedy, and a clever one. The odd hook is our hero is a popular comic strip artist, and when he gets an idea he enacts it in detail with his butler taking pictures of the scenes. That way he gets fresh ideas on how to illustrate the crazy events, but of course he also has to pretend to do some crazy stuff in public. It's pretty hilarious on that level, and when the problem of the woman enters the equation, he tries to turn it into material for his comics. That works for awhile.
The actors around Lemmon are not all convincing, though his butler is rather wonderfully affected. The women, not surprisingly, are all pretty shallow and decorative, the main one being a true Italian import, the actress Virna Lisi, who thankfully did mostly Italian movies before drifting into television. She is meant to be a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and does pretty well at it, but you do wonder what we need a Marilyn Monroe look-alike for three years after her death.
Anyway, this kind of movie is an acquired taste, and I'm drifting more and more away from this style, having seen a dozen or so in the last few months. Luckily the Netflix version is nice and sharp and is full widescreen. I just can't do as another reviewer wrote, "I laugh I lust," and so I'm maybe unqualified to enjoy this movie, whatever its comedic charms.