How to Murder Your Wife

Hi Aki,

Another movie very different, though it too is a guy movie – How to Murder Your Wife from 1965. just about a perfect comedy. Absolutely flawless, at least from a man’s point of view; I suspect women would not find it entirely amusing, even though it pokes almost as much fun at men as it does at women.

The battle of the sexes waged in new york city in the mid-60s. Jack Lemmon plays Stanley Ford, a successful comic strip writer and illustrator whose strip, Bash Brannigan Secret Agent is famous because Ford never asks Bash to do anything Ford himself hasn’t already done. So for every caper Ford hires actors, props, and goes about the city engaging in make-believe spy antics while his faithful butler photographs everything; Ford then uses the pictures as the basis of the illustrations in the strip.

One more thing: Ford is a committed, philosophical bachelor. Marriage is the one thing to avoid, and his butler epitomizes the attitude and worships Ford as the embodiment of the ideal – until one night at a bachelor party Ford gets drunk and marries the girl who pops out of the cake.

This girl turns out to be italian, a contestant in the Miss Galaxy contest, and doesn’t speak a word of english. So arranging for an annulment or divorce is difficult. Moreover, as a good catholic, the new Mrs Ford will never, never agree to divorce.

Ford loses his butler and settles down to unhappy wedded life. He turns his comic strip into The Brannigans, the adventures of America’s Favorite Hen-Pecked Boob and fills the strips with all the comic misery of his own life. He puts on 20 pounds, is lethargic, and knows america is laughing at his strip – and at him.

Finally he snaps and decides to put the strip back to spy business; to do this, Bash Brannigan must murder Mrs Brannigan, and Ford concocts a fiendish scheme which he play-acts also, just like in the old days. He puts on a party, gets his wife drunk and high from ‘goofballs’ so she passes out; while the party still is in full swing, Ford takes a mannequin representing his wife out and buries it in the cement foundation of a building under construction next door.

When morning comes and Mrs Ford awakens, she finds the strips that Ford, asleep on the drawing board, has just finished. Upset, she takes off her ring, puts on only the clothes she came in, and leaves.

Ford reports her missing. But suspicions arise, when the strips are published, that he has killed her. Soon Ford finds himself in jail, charged with murder. And everybody knows he’s guilty.

The trial goes from bad to worse. Ford’s attorney, a hen-pecked boob himself, hardly tries to defend Ford, fearing the wrath of his own wife (these two are great in support – Eddie Mayehof as the lawyer, and Claire Trevor as his shrill and domineering wife). at last in desperation, Ford takes over his own defense and in a brilliant, and brilliantly-acted speech, convinces the jury (all men) to acquit him on ‘grounds of justifiable homicide.’ he ends up being carried out on their shoulder, the hero of all the hen-pecked boobs.

But though Ford now has his old life back again, he doesn’t embrace it, because in the end, he misses his wife. He loves her after all and when he and the butler get back to the townhouse, there is Mrs Ford, and Ford eagerly embraces her. Meanwhile in the butler’s quarters the butler (another perfect turn by Terry Thomas) finds Mrs Ford’s mother – and it’s love at first sight there, too…

George Axelrod wrote it, the direction is by David Quine, a name I don’t know. Richard Sylbert, top production designer, is on hand and does a great, great job; Neal Hefti’s music is catchy and funny at once.

Everybody in the production is on top of his game. It reminds me overall of a French farce of the late 19th century, when play mechanics were worked out to perfection, everything worked like clockwork, and the cast was perfect for their roles and knew just how to exaggerate their performances by just enough to get the laughs, but (outside a couple moments) never go over the top and overdo.

One point that is not from the 19th century, perhaps, and marks it as coming from the 1960s, is what passes for love between Ford and his never-named wife: it is less love, and more sheer sexual chemistry. For Mrs Ford they cast Virna Lisi, a blonde ‘sex bomb’ of the period, but luckily she could also pantomime and act and be sexy, touching when needed, and funny throughout.

I’ve seen this movie several times, and I almost have it memorized. Even as a kid I loved it, although it was obviously aimed at the WW2-generation of American men, then hitting mid-life crisis and maybe wondering what they’d missed by getting married and settling down. So I’d have to say it appeals to the boy in all men; it does indeed depict American men as boys at heart, impervious to maturing or growing up.

(15 April 2009)