I remember the first time I saw Jack Lemmon in How to Murder Your Wife. No, I don't remember what year it was, but I remember what it made me feel. I wanted to be a comic artist after watching this film. How could I not?Jack Lemmon leads a life of amazing luxury in a beautiful Manhattan townhouse, with his own "man" at his beck and call and all because he draws a daily newspaper comic strip. Who wouldn't be enticed into the business by that?
Over the years I have seen this film at least a dozen or so times. I like it so much I have it on my TiVo list to be automatically recorded whenever it comes on. It came on this week on Showtime.
The premise of the film is that artist Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon) leads this idyllic life in Manhattan where he works on his newspaper strip, Bash Brannigan. One of the twists in the film is that Stanley actually acts out Bash's adventures while his "man," Charles, (Terry-Thomas) films it all. Stanley then uses the photos as reference for his strip.
Stanley leads the life he does because he never got married (or so the film says). When Stanley gets drunk at a bachelor party and wakes up the next morning in bed with and married to Virna Lisi, his idyllic life goes all to hell. And then... well, you may want to see the film sometime and I should leave something of the plot unexplained.
Like I said, I've seen this film many times, but this was the first time it left me cold. No, not because the film is about "murdering" your wife or how women ruin men's lives. No, the film lost me about 20 minutes in, when Stanley talks to Charles about how great it would be to blow up a Manhattan skyscraper for his next strip.
Wow, that used to be a funny gag, but in the world we live in today, there is nothing funny about that at all; in fact, it yanks you right out of the picture. I guess in comedy timing is everything.
Today a line like that is a quick way to murder any comedy.
1 comment:
Netflix sent me this the other day and we watched most of it last night. When the missus told me you had a posting about why you can't watch it anymore, my first reaction was: "It's because of 9/11, isn't it?"
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