I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Prosperous comic-strip artist Jack Lemmon marries party girl Lisi with surprising results that put him on trial for murder.Spotty film that wrings a few laughs out of its performers, especially Mayehoff. I agree with those who find the final cut too long. The scenes with Lisi's kissy-face are repetitious long after we've gotten the idea. This is not one of Lemmon's showcases since the laughs are mainly tossed to Mayehoff and Terry-Thomas. Looks also like director Quine was uninspired by a poorly edited screenplay that doesn't catch fire until the last. (For contrast, catch his bouncy Operation Mad Ball {1957} with Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs.)Critics lambaste this film for what they see as a misogynistic subtext. After all, the all-male jury responds heartily to Lemmon's disappear-your-wife appeal. But more closely considered, Lemmon's is not an appeal against women; it's an appeal against the constraints of marriage, particularly for prosperous men who can afford bachelor desires. Besides the staging is much too silly to take seriously. That jury segment is more like a pipe dream that conveniently omits those ties that sustain most marriages. On the other hand, the possible gay part with Terry-Thomas is sneakily present, even if papered over at the last moment with Lemmon's "man". After all, this was the repressed part of the 1960's, an extension of the strait-jacketed 1950's. So, it's not surprising that monogamy and, more covertly, homosexuality would surface in a transitional year like 1965.Overall, the film's more like a period piece than an enduring chuckle-fest, and not one of Lemmon's comedy standouts.

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.

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.

Cartoonist Stanley Ford loves bachelorhood, he enjoys his life, he has a butler to serve him, he can get girls, and he likes a drink or two. Then one night he's at a bachelor party and the beautiful Virna Lisi pops up out of the cake, his life is about to change. For when he wakes up in the morning, he finds he has married her, and to compound his problems, she doesn't speak any English.As a big Jack Lemmon fan I have to say I'm very disappointed in this picture, it's essentially a two joke movie that wastes Lemmon and Terry-Thomas' talent. The first half of the picture plays heavy on the fact that the new Mrs Ford only speaks Italian, this sets us up for a number of funny sequences, particularly when Claire Trevor enters the fray as Edna, but on it goes, and on it goes... We then get to watch as Stanley gains weight due to Mrs Ford's willingness to cook for her new husband, with Lemmon reduced to playing Stanley as an exasperated buffoon, henpecked within an inch of his manhood.The second half of the picture, as the title suggests, sees Stanley grow a spine and decide to deal with his problem by killing the wife. You would think that this sets the picture up for a number of riotous sequences as Stanley tries to do away with her, but sadly no, it's just the one joke that fails to light up the picture in any shape or form. The run in to the finale is marginally saved by the always reliable Eddie Mayehoff, but come the credits you wonder if the film ever meant to be a full blown comedy in the first place? 4/10 for Mayehoff and Terry-Thomas' opening scenes.