How to Murder Your Wife

Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas. A cartoonist has too much to drink one night and wakes up with a bad hangover-and a new wife! But when his based-on-real-life comic strip depicts a dead wife, he finds himself on trial for her murder. 1965/color/119 min/NR/widescreen.

"Being married is the normal way to live... isn't it?" The note of doubt at the end of that statement is fully exploited in How to Murder Your Wife (1965), a barbed piece of war-between-the-sexes comedy. Cartoonist Jack Lemmon, an exponent of the Playboy philosophy, lives in the ultimate swinging bachelor townhouse ("Everything masculine and perfect," manservant Terry-Thomas says approvingly) until a drunken evening leads to marriage with an Italian bombshell (Virna Lisi). What to do? The whole movie seems to exist in order to arrive at Lemmon's clever courtroom oration in the final half-hour, which is tartly funny if datedly misogynistic: he unleashes a male fantasy of trashing the gray-flannel suit and late-model station wagon for Hefneresque freedom. The wheel-spinning of the early reels is curious coming from screenwriter George Axelrod, usually a reliable satirist. He had better hours than this, notably in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Lord Love a Duck. --Robert Horton