Pretty Good

Powerful

Awesome Movie

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Anyone expecting a sex farce, even one rendered innocuous by the censorship of the time, will find this not only a disappointing but a sobering experience. Instead of the colour one would expect for a comedy, it is in serious black and white, and what one takes away from it is not the naughtiness of illicit love but the grimness, frustration and boredom of middle-aged suburban marriage. These, along with bratty and selfish children, are made so plain that it's no wonder Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, married to others, are drawn together when they unexpectedly find themselves alone on a tropic vacation. While tedious, jokey happenings result in their never consummating their affair, either then or in later attempts, the movie never achieves a genuinely comic tone. It is sour and depressed, and when the two decide that it's wrong to hurt the ones they love (although the whole point of their getting together is that they love each other, not their spouses) they return to their lawful homes with a feeling of duty rather than joy. This is typical of the time--that period before the Sixties really got started. One could now acknowledge the formerly unsayable--that marriage was boring and even nice, good people had extra-marital urges. But it was still too soon to say that such urges should be acted on, so the urges are stamped on with a lot of unconvincing moralizing, which sounds more like fear than morality.Bob Hope, at 57, was too old for this story of couples married fifteen years who are the parents of small children. Lucy, at 50, looks much closer to the early-forties housewife she is supposed to be. But both are wrong for these sort of parts--having to play serious, Hope is merely stern and repressed. He was always the businessman among comedians, and in this he is all businessman. Lucy's character is as phoney as her whisk-broom eyelashes--she comes across as selfish and hard.The phoniness of the whole enterprise can be summed up in the situation that brings Bob and Lucy together. They are unexpectedly alone when illness and emergencies strike their spouses and another couple with whom they always go on vacation. And why do the three couples always do this? Because, we are told, these people, who live in huge, comfortable houses, have servants, and belong to the country club, could not otherwise afford to go away! Talk about writers who were not even trying!

Do not adultery commit, Advantage seldom comes of it.Thus wrote the 19th century poet A H Clough in "The Latest Decalogue", his satirical version of the Ten Commandments. Clough may have meant these words satirically, but they sum up fairly accurately the way in which his literary contemporaries treated adultery in their works. There was an unwritten law to the effect that writers could deal with the subject on condition that they made it clear that advantage seldom comes of it. Thus Flaubert made Emma Bovary poison herself and Tolstoy had Anna Karenina jump under a train, as a salutary warning to their readers that they disregarded their marriage vows at their peril. This moralistic attitude to marital infidelity survived well into the twentieth century, and the advent of the Production Code meant that it found a new home in the motion picture industry. Indeed, it seemed to survive there long after it had gone into a decline in the literary world. By the 1950s, however, even Hollywood scriptwriters were starting to take a more liberal attitude towards the Seventh Commandment, the Marilyn Monroe vehicle "The Seven Year Itch" being a case in point. Admittedly, nobody actually commits adultery in that movie, but the main male character certainly considers doing so, and the subject is treated in a generally light-hearted manner, not as the occasion for some heavy-handed moralising. "The Facts of Life" was made in the opening year of the following decade, and like a number of films from the period such as "Where the Boys Are", also from 1960, it is very much of its period, marked by a coyly suggestive attitude to sex which would have been too suggestive for 1940 or 1950 and too coy for 1970 or 1980. Even the title derives from a sexual euphemism; "Do your children know the facts of life?" is a way of asking "Do your children know the facts of human sexuality?" Whereas "Where the Boys Are" dealt with love and sex among young single people, this film is a comedy of love and adultery (or at least attempted adultery) among the middle-aged middle classes. Three California couples, the Gilberts, Masons, and Weavers, have a long-standing agreement to go away on holiday together each year. One year fifty-something Larry Gilbert and forty-something Kitty Weaver unexpectedly find themselves alone in Acapulco after their respective spouses are unable to travel with them and the Masons are taken ill. Even more unexpectedly, Larry and Kitty, who have previously not cared for one another very much, fall in love. The rest of the film chronicles their attempts to consummate their relationship. As in "The Seven Year Itch", nobody actually ends up in bed with anyone other than their lawful partner, but in Larry and Kitty's case that's not for want of trying, and the film certainly does not take a moralistic attitude towards their antics. As I said, the film would have started to look a bit old-fashioned even by 1970, and today, more than fifty years after it was made, its rather twee attitude to sex looks hopelessly antiquated. The plot is horribly artificial and unrealistic. The scriptwriters try to exploit that old romantic comedy chestnut- old even in 1960- about two people who start off by disliking each other and end up madly in love, but here it just does not work. In most films which rely on this plot device the initial dislike is something momentary, based upon a mistaken first impression, which is later corrected, allowing love to develop gradually. Here, however, Larry and Kitty go from hating to loving one another almost in the blink of an eyelid. Moreover, as they appear to have known each other for a considerable length of time, their mutual dislike was presumably based upon something more than a temporary misunderstanding. Lucille Ball, in her late forties, was still attractive enough to make a convincing romantic comedy heroine. (She was actually nominated for a Golden Globe for "Best Actress – Comedy"). Bob Hope, however, comes across as a bit dull and lacking in charisma, and never makes us understand what Kitty sees in Larry. Hope was always better as a comedian than as a comic actor, and does not really shine in a film like this one which depends more upon comic situations than upon comic dialogue. The film as a whole was reasonably well received when it came out in 1960, and was nominated for five Academy Awards, but it has dated badly, even in comparison with other comedies of the era. Compared, say, with something like "The Apartment" (also from 1960, and which also takes illicit sexual relationships as its theme), "The Facts of Life" comes across like an over-extended episode from some long-forgotten television sitcom. 4/10

A sort of Southern California version of Brief Encounter, reinvented to suit Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, who play married (but not to each other) Pasadena country club types who find themselves on an Acapulco vacation without their spouses - and fall in love. Lucille Ball plays Kitty very well and without undue sentiment. This is a type of character you may not have seen her play before. It's her performance that draws you into the story and makes you care. Bob Hope, as Larry, isn't really in Ball's league, as far as dramatic acting goes. He was never an emotional actor. But Norman Panama and Melvin Frank (who wrote for him so many other times), do something brilliant. They make his character a frustrated amateur comic. A wannabe Bob Hope, if you will. So that he can, in a sense, play himself. And it works.Overall, there are some missed opportunities for a really sharp comedy such as Billy Wilder might have made. But Panama and Frank are experts at writing funny yet entirely natural dialogue, and creating realistic characters and situations. The black and white film also features Philip Ober (Vivian Vance's husband, at the time), and in the smallish but important roles of the spouses, Ruth Hussey and Don DeFore.

Lucille Ball and Bob Hope are in fine form in this very funny movie. What makes it so good is that Ball and Hope do not over-do the comedic routines. Yes, Ball sings in her horrendous way in one scene, but the two easily prove that they were pros in every sense of the word.The film deals with 2 people who by fate are left alone in Mexico after their spouses are unable to make the trip and another couple fall ill. The film shows how Ball and Hope fall in love and think that they were made for each other.Ball is a frustrated housewife. Hope is the one who really has fate placing him into this romance.How they realize that their affair was wrong and that marriage is out of the question is done quite well with sharp wit by both these thespians.