How to Murder Your Wife

The comic style of this film is reflected in Jack Lemmon's cartoons; in fact, he creates his comic-strip character, Brash Brannigan, in his own likeness and then tries to influence his own life by changing Brash's. A brilliant narrative trick.

The last time I saw this, adult life lay ahead like a kind of exam. Orange juice in the shower, and beautiful blonds popping out of cakes seemed to be the goal. This film was like a comedic case study in lifestyle management, a blueprint to be stored away - just in case. I liked all the ideas here: the perfect bachelor life, waking up and finding yourself married, the club where you can't be reached - and it's still likable.

Lemmon shows terrific timing with his rapid use of language and gesture that has an amazing flexibility to it - as a technique that is surely unique to him. Terry-Thomas is splendid and quite solid in contrast. Of course we scoff at the idea of a cartoonist living in a townhouse in the middle of Manhatten with a butler, but that's a metaphor for the end of the old days.

The Brash Brannigan shenanigans at the beginning were a little overdone though, and the courtroom scene near the end is more than preposterous - it's post-posterous; the whole murder trial device is weakened by the fact that we know what actually happened - much better if there'd been some doubt in our minds also as to whether he had killed his wife - hard to understand how George Axelrod's script missed that obvious point.

Still, the humour tootles along nicely: the gloppita-gloppita machine; the goofballs that make your wife dance on the table - Brrrrrrrrrrp! - and then collapse - Blapppp!; delicious Virna Lisi; and those in-your-dreams lifestyle tips - it's like re-reading an old favourite comic strip.

A comedy that, if made today, would likely be under attack from every politically correct special interest group you could name. The title alone would bring out the picket signs. That observation aside, "How to Murder Your Wife" is a very funny comedy in which the supporting cast outshine the stars. Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, and Terry Thomas are all good, but it is Eddie Mayehoff and Claire Trevor who really make this one memorable. There never was a henpecked bumbler like the great Mayehoff, and no one could match Trevor as a...well, you know, the word that begins with a B.

Jack Lemmon is a cartoonist who figures out "How to Murder Your Wife" in this 1965 film also starring Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas, Claire Trevor, Eddie Mayehoff, Max Showalter and Sidney Blackmer. Lemmon is Stanley Ford, a successful cartoonist of a dashing James Bond-like figure. Ford leads the perfectly structured life in his gorgeous Manhattan townhouse. He has a man servant (Thomas), his weight his perfect, he works out, and he has a nice social life. One night that all changes. While drunk, a gorgeous blond (Lisi) comes out of a cake at a stag party, and Stanley marries her immediately. It turns out she can't speak a word of Englsh. She's an incredible Italian cook so his weight goes up. Under the influence of the domineering wife (Trevor) of his attorney (Mayehoff), she checks in on him at his club and gets him thrown out; she shops until she drops; she redecorates in chintz; his man servant leaves. His life is a disaster.

What Stanley does, his cartoon character does. His cartoon character was a swinging bachelor who got married when Stanley did. Now it's time for the character to kill his wife and go back to being a swinging bachelor. Stanley always does his sketches from photographs of himself actually performing the various tasks in his cartoon. Now he gets a blond mannequin and has the character kill his wife. Just one problem - Stanley's wife actually leaves with no forwarding address, and Stanley has the pictures to show himself killing her.

This film is totally sexist and misogynistic, but despite the weak ending, the concept is funny, and Lemmon is very good as a man watching his well-oiled life unravel before him. It's all about how a woman takes over a man's life and runs the show, and that does often seem to be true, though it's overstated here for the sake of comedy. The secret of any kind of marital bliss is some sort of compromise here and there, and by the end of the film, the characters are coming around.

I'm not crazy about most of these '60s battle of the sexes comedies, and it's no wonder that Jack Lemmon didn't really like making them. This one has some good scenes, like Lemmon being photographed carrying out different situations (with hired actors) for his cartoon. Terry-Thomas is quite funny, Lisi is beautiful, and Trevor is good in the role of an overbearing wife. Mayehoff makes a good henpecked husband.

Pleasant but not great.

I really want to recommend this movie to you.

Sure, it has a weak third act which pounds a particularly misogynistic message. And the end is so formulaic it hurts. But up until then, it classifies as among the best of comedies.

I have a particular admiration for it as what I think is the first example of a cartoonist whose drawings interweave with his life. Its a clever idea at root but handled with extra sophistication here.

The setup is that our hero (Jack Lemmon) is a cartoonist who draws himself in his strip as a sort of James Bond character. But before he draws each strip, he actually acts it out as movies that we see in the movie within the movie. (How he hires the actors and arranges the locations is a detail left unexplained.)

Thus, strip and life have a relationship within the story proper. Much is made of conflating the movie, the life depicted in the movie, the strip, and the movies within.

He ends up with an unwanted (well, sort of) wife and acts out her murder. Since she left in a huff, he has no defense when his readership (the whole country it seems) accuses him of real murder.

The pinnacle of this confabulation comes when his butler comes to the realization that the murder has actually been real with the enactment an alibi. Things go downhill from there. But until that point, this is sublime, a comic "Draughtsman's Contract."

See it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I really love this movie and have little to add to the positive comments posted already.

One question though...

As the cartoonist, Jack Lemmon would always act out the scene first with his butler taking pictures Jack would use to draw the comic strip. He did this for the Bash Brannigan diamond caper at the beginning of the movie.

Then, when Jack decided Bash Brannigan should kill off his wife, Jack walked around the city to get the supplies he (Jack) would need to act it out; a mannequin (because he wasn't going to dump his real wife's body in cement), the pills, and a remote control.

Later, in the comic strip, Brash walks around the city and buys a mannequin, pills and a remote control.

So, wasn't it a mistake in logic to show Bash Brannigan in the comic strip saying he would need a mannequin? Bash was not acting it out. He was killing Mrs. Brannigan. Right?