Imagine a Welsh Alfie who, following a period of amusing lechery, suddenly and inexplicably decides to renounce infidelity and be cloyingly lovey dovey with his wife and you have some idea of this initially funny but ultimately disappointing Peter Sellers comedy from a Kingsley Amis novel. That author could usually balance his disdain for far left Swingerism with an equal contempt for middle class moralism but apparently not in this early work (entitled "That Uncertain Feeling" but changed for this movie so as not to confuse it with another disappointing comedy, made in 1941 and directed by Lubitsch, with Melvin Douglas and Burgess Meredith).
The result is an uncharacteristically tepid Sellers performance which occasionally hits the proper hilarious notes (as in anything having to do with plumbing) but too often resides in the land of the silly (the botched bedding of Mai Zetterling in a cow pasture) and, what is even worse for this most anarchic of comic geniuses, the smug (the ending). Give it a C plus.
The result is an uncharacteristically tepid Sellers performance which occasionally hits the proper hilarious notes (as in anything having to do with plumbing) but too often resides in the land of the silly (the botched bedding of Mai Zetterling in a cow pasture) and, what is even worse for this most anarchic of comic geniuses, the smug (the ending). Give it a C plus.