Sex and the Single Girl (1964, Richard Quine) **
“They want me to turn that dirty rag into the most influential news magazine in the whole world.”
The bestseller and iconoclastic book, by Helen Gurley Brown, screen rights were purchased by Warner Brothers for the unheard of sum of $200,000; not for the content -- but for the title alone. The review in Time magazine described it this way, “Since the book is plotless, a collection of jiffy food recipes pressed between pages of instant indiscretion, the film makers fabricated this silly little comedy starring Natalie Wood and other celebrities old enough to know better.”
On so many ways we want this middling mid-sixties comedy to succeed. But alas despite the A-list cast, it fails as comedy on so many levels. But in a weird way the movie makes up for its shortcoming as a time capsule (& curiosity).
In retrospect the movie; Sex and the Single Girl was at the nexus of many of the major players in mythical community of Hollywood and American popular culture in its day.
In the mid-1960’s, before the “summer of love”, America was still trying to shake-off the boring lifestyle and conformity of the Eisenhower post war years. Movies like this played into the imaginary notion of “sexual liberation” (a term not yet invented).
Sex and the Single Girl as a movie came wrapped in the most seductive package of all – it was recommended for Adults Only and it opened on Christmas Day. “Adults Only” was the consummate label of the era intended to create interest and excite the imagination of the “adult” film going public and guarantee box-office; odd for a Christmas movie – talk about counter-programming.
Adult moviegoers were promised they were going to see something, “dirty”. Because “sex” was dirty in 1964.
“Sex comedies” were nothing new; either as a genre or as films directed by Richard Quine (who made a bundle making them). The notion of using double- entendre to “say more than you’re saying” had been popular in movies since silents (no pun intended) and in the theater since, well how long do you want to go back? Let’s face it, sex sells and it always will.
Other bright spots in Quine’s sex comedy career extend to How To Murder Your Wife (from the same year) and The Notorious Landlady two years earlier (1962). Additionally he also acquitted himself very well with the “woman’s weeper” in 1960 with Strangers When We Meet and the stylish production of the Broadway hit Bell Book and Candle (1958). It made Manhattan look so inviting, almost like a “Disneyland for adults”.
A key ingredient of the genre, and for all practical purposes a character in its own right, is “booze”. The primary component for the loosening of inhibitions and likely to make the female of the species susceptible to seduction and of course sex, often adulterous and always outside of marriage.
“How about a drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
Booze was a big part of things.
“Is there any more of this?”
“Are you kidding?”
In Sex and the Single Girl we have two generations of super-star couples; Wood & Curtis and Fonda & Bacall. Natalie Wood plays Helen Gurley Brown. But in this incarnation it’s Dr. Brown, a psychologist specializing in marital issues (short hand in those days for “sexual relations”).
Curtis edits a salacious magazine about sex and gossip – always dressed to the nines in solid dark suits and fashionable “sports” clothes. This was the early 1960’s, people still dressed up.
Sex and the Single Girl demonstrates the top of Curtis’ star power – he is able to claim top-billing in the movie version of the #1 Best Seller of the decade and have his character fashioned into the lead (vs. Wood’s character who plays the book’s author).
Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda are too old for rock and roll but too young for America’s songbook – this generation of stars had to pretend to be infinitely contemporary and not be thought of as “classic film stars”.
Henry Fonda (his third film in ’64 along with Fail Safe and The Best Man) plays a married man who owns a hosiery company (who is obviously fascinated with women’s legs) and lives in constant fear of (Lauren Becall) his wife’s routine eruptions of jealous rage.
What now might be construed as a fantasy sequence is played straight, as a musical number with Count Basie and his Orchestra in a nightclub. This was a time in movies when musical popular culture straddled the great divide between top 40 music and adult contemporary. It had to “swing” but not be traditional big band or popular rock – music that everyone thought was “listenable”. Unfortunately in nearly every outing this philosophy of movie music ran a ground and appealed to nobody.
Lauren Bacall, a creation of Howard Hawks (in the manner of Slim Keith) and the widow of Humphrey Bogart, made a handful of undistinguished films in the intervening years after his death. The only arguable exception is Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956). Bacall made only one more film before going back to New York and reinvented herself on Broadway. In Harper she played a wronged wife and femme fatal, against the inquiring PI played by Paul Newman. (Watch out, this is one of my favorite movies so it will no doubt wind-up in a future post.) Remember, Betty is not back on the screen until 1976 when she appears in Don Siegel’s western, The Shootist.For the record: Slim Keith was her own recreation – with embellishments from Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward and much later Truman Capote, said in her memoirs, more on this in a later post). "God blessed me with a happy spirit and many other gifts. What I was not blessed with I went out and got. Sometimes the price was too high, but I've never been much of a bargain hunter." from Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life (1991).
Fonda and Curtis made two movies together, this one and in 196x The Boston Strangler – the last good movie Curtis made.
Jack Lemmon and his work in Some Like It Hot (with Tony Curtis) is lampooned throughout the movie. It was five years after Wilder’s film and it was still considered topical. “He’s young and handsome and charming, he looks like Jack Lemmon.” Curtis’ character is called Mr. Lemmon once while wearing a woman’s nightgown.
“Go to Vegas kid you can make a bundle!”
Curtis and Wood had made Kings Go Forth (with Frank Sinatra) in the late 50’s, and went on to make The Great Race (with Jack Lemmon) before both of their careers disintegrated when the 1960’s commenced in full force with Easy Rider. And the “super-star system” became undone.
An incredible cast of supporting players include (our favorite best pal from all the Fred & Ginger pairing in the 1930’s) Edward Everett Horton, Mel Ferrer (at the time married to Audrey Hepburn), Stubby Kaye after Li'l Abner (1959) and before Cat Ballou (1965) and the indomitable Otto Knuger.
Knuger in his last role plays the head of the psychology practice where Wood works. He made his film debut in 1923, but it was in the 1930s that Kruger's polished, urbane characterizations came into full swing. Although he occasionally played a hero, as in Corregidor (1943), he was often cast as the amoral villain (in Hitchcock’s 1947 Saboteur) or a charming but corrupt businessman (usually a banker), a task at which he excelled. Kruger was one of the industry's busiest character actors until a series of strokes brought about his retirement in the mid-1960s.
Another fascinating artifact about this movie is that its screenwriter was Joseph Heller screenwriter – it was ’64 when his 1961 novel Catch-22 was optioned by a studio, his other screenwriting credit is Dirty Dingus McGee easily the worst movie Frank Sinatra made after we first saw him act in From Here To Eternity.
Our movie ends in a manic car chase (foreshadowing things to come in movies and in real life Los Angeles). Los Angeles’ freeways are just as barren and unattractive today as they are in second-unit footage for this film. It’s important to note that nowhere in the film is its locale identified; either by name or iconography until the madcap freeway chase. Hollywood’s idea of the 1960’s was as over-the-top in concept as it was in execution.
The finale at the new Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), with its icon the Theme Building in full view portends a look at America’s future. Next stop the “swinging sixties” and most definitely in La La Land.
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