How to Murder Your Wife (1965)
Stanley Ford leads an idyllic bachelor life. He is a nationally syndicated cartoonist whose Bash Brannigan series provides him with a luxury townhouse and a full-time valet, Charles. When he wakes up the morning after the night before - he had attended a friend's stag party - he finds that he is married to the very beautiful woman who popped out of the cake - and who doesn't speak a word of English. Despite his initial protestations, he comes to like married life and even changes his cartoon character from a super spy to a somewhat harried husband.
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Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
Oh Dear, go at the end of the reviews and you will see the feminist reviews blaming this movie for all the women's suffering of the world, or even being gay, or simply illogical in some aspects. Now if like me you are a relatively happy married fellow with some basic desire to be respected in our masculinity, if you see no gay tendency for having a butler or for going to a male only gym and massage session (like many Asian gentlemen still indulge in), and if you see with both happiness and inquietude your tummy increasing from eating your wife's delicious food (yes, it still happens that women can cook and care), then you will enjoy it! I really enjoy the idea of a gentleman club, with healthy gym and a bit of a drinks later. It would be such a relief from our daily concerns, it would allow some socializing and contrary to what some ill-intended feminists may think, a no-lady-accepted club is the guarantee to wives that their husband does not get miscarried by extra-marital adventures. Allowing men to go there, only once a week, would be beneficial to everyone. Of course it will not happen: men have to baby-sit, cook, work hard, help to the house-core, and are only sometimes allow to watch a stupid game on TV while eating a popcorn bag and drinking a cheap beer. The movie depicts the time of good old fellows, talking civilized English, drinking a chilled martini, and singing good men songs while drunk instead of vomiting obscenities out of a bar. Let us go back to this good old time, which was not good for everyone... but let us enjoy it, just once, and laugh about it!
There's nothing to find offensive in "How to Murder Your Wife" except its almost two hour running time where the funniest thing is the gap in Terry-Thomas's teeth and the droll way he has of saying his lines. He must have improvised some of them because the lack of funny dialog in the rest of the script doesn't belly the wit in his character.Those expecting a 60's view of the theory "Men are From Mars/Women are from Venus" will be sadly disappointed. Even so-called women haters will be furious that the only thing to hate about these women is that they don't warrant being hated, only pitied for being sitcomishly annoying. And feminists too won't find anything new to claim offense to; The men here only bash women for the same argument they have had for decades-being too motherly, coddling, nagging, and lightly controlling. The idea of a showdown between the sexes does make for an appealing black comedy that could have been truly fresh, but unfortunately, the writers wimped out. They only added a lot more sex.While the Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies (without the sex) were the opening Pandora's Box of a slew of similar films throughout the 60's, more films added a lot more eroticism with a European flavor. "How to Murder Your Wife" takes Italian blonde beauty Virni Lisi, throws her in as comic strip writer Jack Lemmon's unplanned trip to a Justice of the Peace, and motivates him to write a series of strips where he reveals a plan to kill off the fictional wife of a bachelor obviously based on him. Lisi gets wind of all this, flies the coup, and Lemmon is suddenly accused of murder.The film is all a cop-out on what could have been a delicious caper that somehow turns out happy. But we've seen the supposedly deceased story before ("Irma La Douce" and "The Art of Love") in 60's sex comedies, and the set-up is so obviously easy to fix that it ends up being predictable. It makes no sense that Lemmon, even intoxicated, would wed Lisi, no matter how much in lust with her he was. Lisi, too, may be desirable, but her character is so cloying that there is little desire for the two to reconcile. Poor Claire Trevor (as the wife of Lemmon's lawyer) has to do a drunken dance that is more embarrassing than funny, and the usually funny Mary Wickes does nothing but cry and drink glass after glass of champagne after Lemmon shows up at his lawyer's office for an annulment. If it wasn't for the fabulously droll Terry-Thomas, this movie would be a total bomb!
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.
In 'The Wedding Party' episode of 'Fawlty Towers', Basil ( John Cleese ) tells Major Gowen ( Ballard Berkeley ) that he saw 'How To Murder Your Wife' five times. The film in question was scripted by George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay for 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' ( 1960 ), and directed by Richard Quine. The much-missed Jack Lemmon plays 'Stanley Ford', creator of newspaper comic-strip hero 'Bash Brannigan'. Ford won't have Bash do anything he has not done himself first; with the aid of actors, he acts out Bash's larger-than-life adventures before committing them to paper. Ford lives the life of a playboy in a swank New York apartment, with only his British manservant Charles ( Terry-Thomas ) for company. It is a lifestyle us blokes would willingly kill for.But, after a drunken party, Ford wakes up in bed with a beautiful Italian ( Virna Lisi ) to whom he is now married. She has virtually no command of English, so he cannot even find out her name. She is very sexually demanding, and Ford finds his work affected. He marries Bash off in the comic strip, which turns from being a secret agent series into a domestic comedy. Unable to tell her to leave, Ford decides to kill her..."Good evening, gentlemen!", says Terry-Thomas at the start of this picture: "I take it your wives are not with you?". On release, this was accused by some of being in poor taste, but the fact is it is tremendous entertainment, boasting Jack Lemmon at his best, and the impeccable Terry-Thomas stealing every scene he is in as the butler. Has there ever been a sexier leading lady than Virna Lisi? When we first see her at a party, she emerges from a cake, and just looks incredible, a vision of pure loveliness. No wonder Ford is smitten! Eddie Mayehoff is great too as Ford's agent. The funniest scene is when Ford makes an impassioned speech to the jury to acquit him on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He draws a dot and tells Mayehoff to imagine it is a button, which by pressing he can remove his wife from his life without anyone knowing. Ford tells him of all the things he would free to do with his wife gone, and Mayehoff is gradually persuaded.The film's gloss dilutes the black comedy premise somewhat, but this is still great fun. Neal Hefti's music is a delight too. Terry-Thomas nominated this as his favourite film.