Word: lemmons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MURDER YOUR WIFE. The mayhem in this nimble comedy about a man who gets drunk and marries without malice aforethought is plotted by Jack Lemmon, whose fracturingly funny performance is smoothly supported by Terry-Thomas and Italy's Virna Lisi, an import who makes hard-sell sex seem as classy as caviar...
...Murder Your Wife is a nimble comedy that doesn't make much sense because it makes nonsense, most of it screechingly funny and played by knockabouts who know that the slapstick was invented for keeping an idea aloft, not for beating it into the ground. Jack Lemmon, too often compelled to flail around in boudoirs as the All-American lecher, demonstrates that he can wipe the leer off his face and make homicidal impulses more hilarious than hard breathing...
Scene of the crime is an improbable Manhattan town house where Cartoonist Lemmon, abetted by his man Friday, Terry-Thomas, draws a James Bondish comic strip called Bash Brannigan. The place is a boy's garden of sex and violence. "No gay little chintzes, no big gunky lamps, the complete absence of a woman's touch," gloats Terry-Thomas. But one night at a bachelor dinner, someone wheels in a gigantic cake that gives forth a frosted blonde (Virna Lisi), and Lemmon, anesthetized by alcohol, begins to chew his cheeks like a man cutting a sweet tooth...
After that crisis, Wife amiably describes how a fighting-trim bachelor becomes a fat, happy benedict. Lemmon's lady smothers him with love and stuffs him with pasta until he has rings under his eyes and a bulge over his belt. Dragging his paunch through the men's-club swimming pool, he makes the mere act of floating seem a wry comment on the leaden responsibilities of marriage. Even Bash Brannigan evolves into a folksy domestic series called The Brannigans. Finally, Lemmon rebels. Both he and Bash decide to dispose of their mates by dumping them (Brrrp! Blasp...
...mock trial that follows it, Writer George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch) and Director Richard Quine make the mistake of thinking that the muse of comedy is a rubber-limbed contortionist, and sometimes stretch the fun to the breaking point. Luckily, the supporting cast shows such spirit that Lemmon has to work hard for his share of the laughs. As the gentlemen's gentleman who would not hesitate one moment to help rub out a superfluous lady, Terry-Thomas hyphenates the movie with tomfoolery, holding whole scenes together by letting his face fall apart like a piece of shattered...