At one point in "How to Murder Your Wife," a doctor explains to the unhappily married Jack Lemmon that a pill he subscribes is perfectly harmless unless taken with alcohol. Mixed with liquor, it makes a person engage in strange behaviors before collapsing on the floor. Appropriately enough, the people who made this movie--including, incredibly, George Axelrod, the screenwriter for "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's"--must have slipped such a pill into their own drink before working on the film.
I mean it. Quite a few movies from the mid- to late-'60s were like this, showing the influence of, shall we say, something a bit more stimulating than the average pharmaceutical. And while this movie may not be as far out as "Magical Mystery Tour," it doesn't look like the work of a mind that was totally sober. The plot is absurdly illogical in an almost dreamlike fashion, and although it is presented as a comedy, it thinks it has stumbled upon deep truths about the war between the sexes.
Lemmon stars as a popular cartoonist who has performers play out the story-lines he devises, after which he uses photos from the act to help him draw his comic strip, a serialized adventure. This is an intriguing idea, and the scenes involving the design of his strip are the best parts of the film. I wish they had been attached to a movie that maintained this level of creativity throughout.
Lemmon wakes up one morning in bed with a beautiful Italian woman (Virna Lisi) and discovers that in a drunken stupor at a bachelor party the previous night, they had gotten married to each other. This is not exactly an original plot device, but it's something that normally comes at the end of a movie, as a kind of cinematic punchline. It makes for a weak opener, because it's a situation that should be easy to resolve. The lengths to which the characters go to avoid doing the obvious is a wonder to behold. The film is heavy on Idiot Plot--the problem that would go away instantly if the characters weren't idiots--and it continues well beyond the initial setup, all the way to the inane courtroom scene at the climax.
First, there's Lemmon's lawyer friend (Eddie Mayehoff) who is apparently the only lawyer alive in New York. How do we know? Well, for one thing, the mansion-dwelling Lemmon never once considers fishing for a new lawyer, despite the fact that this one is a cartoonishly inept milquetoast kept on a leash by his domineering wife. For another, in the course of the movie he will serve as different types of lawyers, of which criminal defense attorney is only the last.
Terry-Thomas, who narrates the early scenes, plays Lemmon's butler/manservant/photographer. Fearing that the marriage will upset their gay relationship (in the "happy" sense...perhaps), he threatens to quit if Lemmon doesn't have the marriage annulled, which of course is exactly what Lemmon wants to do but finds himself strangely unable to. This is where the film begins to get surreal and dreamlike, as Lemmon can't accomplish what should be an amazingly simple task because all the other characters keep talking loudly over him and not listening to what he has to say except to misunderstand it.
The filmmakers must have gotten so hung up on the central premise--a cartoonist thinking up ways to murder his wife--that they didn't bother to come up with a plausible path to get there. Logic and common sense get thrown to the wind so that the Lemmon character can dream up a murder scenario for a situation with several perfectly sensible alternatives.
I have to admit I expected the murder plot to be more fun. I imagined some elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme (this is a cartoonist, after all), or perhaps a series of plans that keep going wrong. Evidently, it's just not that type of comedy. It seems to promise a colorful outcome with its "gloppita-gloppita" machine shown in the first scene. Though crucial, the machine plays a smaller role than we might expect from a movie titled "How to Murder Your Wife." The film has other ambitions, and they come off heavy-handed and insulting.
Apart from its flaws as a comedy and its far-fetched plot, what really got to me was the film's shameless misogyny. It develops as its principal theme a sort of bizarro reverse feminism, calling for the men in American society to rise up and assert themselves against the women who have enslaved them in unhappy marriages. And this isn't just some self-consciously ironic attempt to turn women's lib on its head: the movie seems at least half-serious on this point. It attacks women's traditional roles not out of sympathy for the women, who are depicted as mindless but malevolent creatures, but to give the men the freedom to pursue their ambitions, such as hanging out with their buddies at their all-male clubs, in peace.
I'm used to seeing older movies with sentiments that now look a bit dated, but I wasn't sure what to make of this one. It came out at a time when many of the old gender stereotypes in Hollywood were breaking down. If the film was intended as a backlash, it's a pretty lame one. I don't know whether the weird scene in the courtroom at the end was supposed to be funny or inspiring, but it succeeds at being neither of those things, and it leaves us with a peculiar feeling of discomfort.
I mean it. Quite a few movies from the mid- to late-'60s were like this, showing the influence of, shall we say, something a bit more stimulating than the average pharmaceutical. And while this movie may not be as far out as "Magical Mystery Tour," it doesn't look like the work of a mind that was totally sober. The plot is absurdly illogical in an almost dreamlike fashion, and although it is presented as a comedy, it thinks it has stumbled upon deep truths about the war between the sexes.
Lemmon stars as a popular cartoonist who has performers play out the story-lines he devises, after which he uses photos from the act to help him draw his comic strip, a serialized adventure. This is an intriguing idea, and the scenes involving the design of his strip are the best parts of the film. I wish they had been attached to a movie that maintained this level of creativity throughout.
Lemmon wakes up one morning in bed with a beautiful Italian woman (Virna Lisi) and discovers that in a drunken stupor at a bachelor party the previous night, they had gotten married to each other. This is not exactly an original plot device, but it's something that normally comes at the end of a movie, as a kind of cinematic punchline. It makes for a weak opener, because it's a situation that should be easy to resolve. The lengths to which the characters go to avoid doing the obvious is a wonder to behold. The film is heavy on Idiot Plot--the problem that would go away instantly if the characters weren't idiots--and it continues well beyond the initial setup, all the way to the inane courtroom scene at the climax.
First, there's Lemmon's lawyer friend (Eddie Mayehoff) who is apparently the only lawyer alive in New York. How do we know? Well, for one thing, the mansion-dwelling Lemmon never once considers fishing for a new lawyer, despite the fact that this one is a cartoonishly inept milquetoast kept on a leash by his domineering wife. For another, in the course of the movie he will serve as different types of lawyers, of which criminal defense attorney is only the last.
Terry-Thomas, who narrates the early scenes, plays Lemmon's butler/manservant/photographer. Fearing that the marriage will upset their gay relationship (in the "happy" sense...perhaps), he threatens to quit if Lemmon doesn't have the marriage annulled, which of course is exactly what Lemmon wants to do but finds himself strangely unable to. This is where the film begins to get surreal and dreamlike, as Lemmon can't accomplish what should be an amazingly simple task because all the other characters keep talking loudly over him and not listening to what he has to say except to misunderstand it.
The filmmakers must have gotten so hung up on the central premise--a cartoonist thinking up ways to murder his wife--that they didn't bother to come up with a plausible path to get there. Logic and common sense get thrown to the wind so that the Lemmon character can dream up a murder scenario for a situation with several perfectly sensible alternatives.
I have to admit I expected the murder plot to be more fun. I imagined some elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme (this is a cartoonist, after all), or perhaps a series of plans that keep going wrong. Evidently, it's just not that type of comedy. It seems to promise a colorful outcome with its "gloppita-gloppita" machine shown in the first scene. Though crucial, the machine plays a smaller role than we might expect from a movie titled "How to Murder Your Wife." The film has other ambitions, and they come off heavy-handed and insulting.
Apart from its flaws as a comedy and its far-fetched plot, what really got to me was the film's shameless misogyny. It develops as its principal theme a sort of bizarro reverse feminism, calling for the men in American society to rise up and assert themselves against the women who have enslaved them in unhappy marriages. And this isn't just some self-consciously ironic attempt to turn women's lib on its head: the movie seems at least half-serious on this point. It attacks women's traditional roles not out of sympathy for the women, who are depicted as mindless but malevolent creatures, but to give the men the freedom to pursue their ambitions, such as hanging out with their buddies at their all-male clubs, in peace.
I'm used to seeing older movies with sentiments that now look a bit dated, but I wasn't sure what to make of this one. It came out at a time when many of the old gender stereotypes in Hollywood were breaking down. If the film was intended as a backlash, it's a pretty lame one. I don't know whether the weird scene in the courtroom at the end was supposed to be funny or inspiring, but it succeeds at being neither of those things, and it leaves us with a peculiar feeling of discomfort.