The Relaxed Wife

This short is basically one of the first pharmaceutical commercials - a long one. In it there is the narrative of the tense husband plagued by insomnia and his "relaxed wife" who tries to teach him how to let go of his mental and emotional nervousness so he can sleep. She has good basic information - relaxation exercises, a warm drink, a hot bath, basically a summing up of "let the day's own troubles be sufficient". In other words, don't worry about what hasn't happened yet.

What is buried among all of the practical natural information is a statement that some people STILL can't relax using these techniques and so doctors have started prescribing "ataraxic" medicine to such people so that they can relax and thus think. It is amusing to view such an infomercial 60 years after the fact since people now know that such medicines are very addictive. At the time this was made these drugs were considered a great step forward in medicine!

Plus, have you ever seen people so overdressed for bedtime? The husband is trying to sleep in his robe and the wife's robe was actually what I thought was a rather fancy dress, complete with the poodle skirt of the time. Worth it for the history of it all, not for what it was intended to be in 1957.

Interesting to note that this anti-stress "educational" short from the late 1950s was funded by Pfizer. Are they pushing diazepam (Valium)? Just wondering . . . Yes, the production is cheap and the acting is atrocious, but consider the time when it was made.

Relaxed Wife, The (1957)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Ultra low-budget "educational" film about a husband who comes home to a noisy house and nothing puts his mind to rest. He's constantly worried about one thing or another so finally his lovely wife makes him get into bed and she reads him a book about stress. These type of educational films were clearly made with good intentions but I often wonder if the people making them realized how silly they were and that no one, except for a complete idiot, would take them serious and follow the advice being given. This one here has a really silly plot because the husband is such an idiot that you can't help but not take him or anything else serious. I'm going to guess he's meant to be some sort of comic relief but his eye-rolling and awful facial gestures just make you want to punch him and nothing else. The film has a few funny bits including one early on when the husband is trying to relax in his chair but the site of his pink pants were just too much. The amazing thing is that this short was made by the fine folks at Princeton and I can't help but think this thing is a part of their history that they'd like to forget.

I was relaxed when I started watching. But ten minutes later, I was ready to throttle Mr. Rubberface and his wife Mrs. Knowitall. Oh sure, the producers made the results goofy so that they could talk about a serious subject—stress. But someone should have cautioned about the pitfall of turning misery into a comedy-short. Looks like somebody got carried away. Anyway, I guess I'm just not ready to lie on the floor, as the short advises, while the wife reads a splatter book on wife killers. But then this mess was sponsored by a division of Pfizer, (IMDB Trivia). So I guess you could say they've got an investment in stress, whatever the source. At least I now know how to pronounce the scary word "ataraxia", and that Pfizer made a fix-it pill called "Atarax". So I guess not all commercials are useless, even one like this. Now where the heck did I leave my joint!

In many ways, this looks like a surrealistic version of one of the Richard Bare-George O'Hanlon 'Joe McDoakes' shorts that flourished in the 1940s and early 1950s at Warner Brothers -- although instead of being from Warner Brothers in Hollywood, it's from 'A Relaxed Organization' in Princeton.

The fact that it seems to be serious about its issues, that it is in color and the neutral-voiced narrator speaks in rhyming couplets renders it a bit pompous and dull, but it does try to take its message lightly, and for a ten-minute short is not too onerous for the viewer. The serious film buff might enjoy the use of modernistic set dressing.