“How to Murder Your Wife” - Richard Quine (1965)

Film comedies, despite their high frequency at your local theaters, don’t appear much on listings of all-time greatest films, especially if you focus your coverage on the sound era.  Those that do appear on such listings often feature other dramatic elements in addition to comedy (such La Dolce Vita (1960) and My Fair Lady (1964)).  What about out-and-out farces?  Well, there is one film from that category that I would nominate – How to Murder Your Wife (1965).

The film, directed by Richard Quine and based on a script by George Axelrod, is very much a showcase of Hollywood production values, featuring high-quality studio camera work, editorial pacing, and Neal Hefti’s lilting background music.  Although the excellence of such Hollywood films is often more attributable to the studio than to a single auteur, How to Murder Your Wife does carry the authorial stamp of script writer George Axelrod.  Axelrod wrote a number of energized and highly successful plays and film scripts during this period, including his play, The Seven Year Itch (1952), his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), his adaptation of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and Lord Love a Duck (1966). 

In the case of How to Murder Your Wife, we have a broad satire on a male fantasy – how wonderful life would be if only men could avoid the fetters of married life.  In this story a wealthy bachelor who is a successful newspaper cartoonist finds himself unexpectedly married after a drunken carouse at a friend’s bachelor party.  His new wife is beautiful, but his old, carefree lifestyle has suddenly vanished.  He finds himself quickly descending into the life of a henpecked frump, American style.  His problem, then, is how to extricate himself from this disastrous situation.

Because of the film’s burlesque characterization of married life, it has naturally brought mixed reactions and accusations of misogyny [1,2].  You will need to suspend your political and cultural correctness meters for a bit in order to appreciate the farcical goings-on in this story.

One of the aspects of How to Murder Your Wife that makes it particularly interesting concerns the multiple-level narrative perspectives in the story.  And this comes about due to the main character’s occupation as a cartoonist. 

We can think of a normal play or story as having two narrative levels, which I will call Narrative-level-0 and Narrative-level-1:

• Narrative-level-0 is what we might call the “real world” of the viewer.  Of course this real-world perspective is fashioned out of the viewer’s own narratives and all the shared narratives of his or her social environment.
• Narrative-level-1 is the main narrative perspective presented in the story.

Narrative-level-1 and Narrative-level-0 can be relatively close, in which case we would consider the story to be highly “realistic”.  Or the two levels can be quite self-consciously separated from each other in terms of “reality’, such as when the Narrative-level-1 is a cartoon.  In that latter case the viewer is clearly aware that the story presented is a fantasy.

However, in How to Murder Your Wife, there are four narrative levels.  This is because the cartoonist, Stanley Ford (played by Jack Lemmon), always carries out (and has photographed) a mock staging of the narrative he is about to draw in his daily newspaper cartoon strip.  In these mock performances, Ford always plays the role of his cartoon protagonist, the secret agent Bash Brannigan.  And Ford’s many readers are aware of this.  As Ford reminds at one point his friend and lawyer Harold Lampson,

“Bash Brannigan is enjoyed by millions, because my readers know it’s absolutely authentic. I’d never ask Brash to do anything I hadn’t already done, myself.”

So we have the following four narrative levels in How to Murder Your Wife:

• Narrative-level-0.  Again, this is the real world of the viewer.
• Narrative-level-1.  This is the narrative level of Stanley Ford, who suddenly finds himself married.
• Narrative-level-2.  This is the mock staging of the Bash Brannigan cartoon strip by Ford and his hired actors.  We and Ford’s readers know that Ford is only playing the role of Bash Brannigan.
• Narrative-level-3.  This is the narrative world of the heroic secret agent Bash Brannigan.  (Newspaper comic-strip narratives, such as Little Orphan Annie, Flash Gordon, and Dick Tracy, have long been popular in the US and offer an escapist fantasy world for readers looking for distraction.)

Note that here in How to Murder Your Wife, the realism separation between Narrative-level-0 and Narrative-level-1 is considerable, becausethe presentation of Narrative-level-1, even though it represents the film’s ground truth, is still very cartoon-like.  This brings the narrative levels 1, 2, and 3 closer together.

The story of How to Murder Your Wife moves through six phases that incorporate at various points these narrative levels.

1.  Stanley Ford’s Bachelor Paradise

The story opens with Stanley Ford’s loyal British valet, Charles Firbank (Terry-Thomas) directly addressing the camera (already there is a narrative-perspective confusion between Narrative-level-0 and Narrative-level-1) and telling the viewer about Ford’s blissful life.  Ford is rich, lives in a posh Manhattan townhouse, has many girlfriends, is attended to by his diligent butler, and always can do exactly what he wants.  Firbank is then shown photographing from a distance Ford staging one of his Bash Brannigan capers (Narrative-level-2) that will be made into a cartoon.

2.  Ford Gets a Wife

Ford attends a bachelor party for one of his friends and, in an inebriated state, he becomes enamored of a beautiful girl who emerges from a large papier-mâché cake that has been wheeled out.  The next morning he wakes up to discover that he married the girl that night and has brought her back to his townhouse.  The girl (Virna Lisi), whom we can call the Wife (she is never named), is extraordinarily beautiful, but is Italian and cannot speak English.

Ford immediately wants to annul his marriage and consults his lawyer, Harold Lampson (played by Eddie Mayehoff, who was famous for the TV series, That's My Boy (1954-55)).  Lampson informs him that now that Ford has sampled the goods, he cannot get an annulment and that a divorce won’t be easy, either.  Lampson, who has a nagging wife, Edna (Claire Trevor), represents the typical browbeaten chump that Ford doesn’t want himself to become.  Since Edna knows Italian, as soon as she meets the Wife, she starts privately counseling the young girl on how to manipulate her new husband and make him her pawn. 

3.  The Brannigans

But the Wife is not manipulative; she is innocent, affectionate, and loving.  However, her womanly ways and fattening recipes can’t help turning Ford’s life upside down.  Very soon the misogynistic Firbank walks out. Acknowledging his new circumstances, Ford changes his cartoon strip to The Brannigan – the Hilarious Misadventures of America’s Favorite Henpecked Boob and begins cartoons about his new circumscribed domestic life.  This turns out to be a big hit with his newspaper readers, especially from female readers. So at this point we have Narrative-level-3 directly connected to Narrative-level-1. 

Increasingly alarmed, Ford goes to his all-male club, his one masculine refuge from his connubial life, and talks to his male friends.  But his Wife, on the advice of the scheming Edna, innocently barges into the club, bringing about Ford’s loss of club membership.

4.  The Plan
Desperate, Ford decides to alter his comic strip and have Bash Brannigan murder his wife so that he can go back to being the heroic secret agent that he used to be.  Naturally, Ford has to photograph a mock staging of this murder in preparation for the drawing of the cartoon.  So we have narrative levels 1, 2, and 3 interlaced here.

However, when his Wife discovers the planned comic strip sequence, she is so offended that she departs from Ford’s townhouse and disappears.

5.  The Murder Trial

Because some people witnessed the mock staging of the latest Bash Brannigan comic strip (Narrative level 2), and now that it has been published (Narrative level 3), and with the Wife nowhere to be found (Narrative level 3 – the cartoon strip had a drugged Mrs. Brannigan being dumped into a huge cement mixer, and so that no body could be found), Ford is quickly arrested on murder charges. 

At the ensuing trial, the circumstantial evidence against Ford is so great that a guilty verdict seems inevitable.  So Ford takes over his own defense from Lampson and falsely confesses to the all-male jury that he did indeed murder his wife.  But, he tells them, if the jury would free him on the grounds of justifiable homicide, it would send a message to all the nagging wives out there to give more scope to their husbands.  In a hilarious court scene, the jury and judge are quickly convinced by Ford’s impassioned argument and immediately declare him innocent.

6.  Coming Home
Ford comes home, with Firbank again onboard, but he misses his Wife.  He realizes that he really does love her. When he finds her waiting for him in his bed, we get the resolution that we all want, including something for his loyal valet, Firbank, too.

Throughout the course of How to Murder Your Wife, the film is invigorated by supportive production values.  There are musical leitmotifs for the main characters and also for the Bash Brannigan caper scenes that make the film almost a musical.  And the energetic performances of Jack Lemmon, Terry-Thomas, and Eddie Mayehoff push the cartoonish flavor without going too far.  Lemmon, in particular, was known for his exaggerated performances, and he enthusiastically, but dangerously, performed his own stunts on Narrative-level-2 [3]:

“Doing his own stunts, Lemmon narrowly avoided being killed when a pipe he was swinging on broke. As he plummeted toward the ground along a fire escape, Lemmon saw a pipe sticking out from the building and ‘I threw out my arm and hooked it right at the elbow. It stopped my descent and I just swung there like a pendulum.’" 

All the way along, narrative levels 1, 2, and 3 reflect a boyish self-centeredness that resists being reined in by womanhood.  This, of course, is what some political-correctness-oriented people object to.  But these kinds of things often come with the territory in black comedy and bald satire.  Around this same time there were other excellent films that satirized male presumptions along these lines, such as Dr. Strangelove (1964) and My Fair Lady (1964).

And we must remember that there is another, parallel theme that permeates Narrative-level-1 in the story besides boyish self-centeredness.  This is embodied by Stanley Ford’s Wife. She is at all times a person enthusiastically offering unconditional and all-embracing love. Of course her beauty is what originally attracted Ford.  But it was her love that gets him over his selfabsorbtion and wins him over in the end. This is something that hopefully every boy learns at some point.  How to Murder Your Wife tells this story very well.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Bosley Crowther, “' How to Murder Wife' Opens at 2 Theaters”, “The New York Times”, (27 January 1965).   
2. Tony Mastroianni, “Lemmon Effective in Marriage Spoof”, Cleveland Press (7 February 1965).  
3. Bill Goodman, “How to Murder Your Wife”, Turner Classic Movies, (2015).   

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” - Blake Edwards (1961)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), directed by Blake Edwards, has always been immensely popular with audiences, though critics have tended to dismiss it as a lightweight romance.  To be sure, the film has all the commercialized luster and trappings of Hollywood, including some almost burlesque comedy scenes, but I think it still holds up as one of the great movies. Although the film is based on Truman Capote’s 1958 novella of the same name, it departs significantly from the original story so that the two works have rather different feelings to them. Capote was unhappy about some of the changes made, but the screenplay, by the gifted writer and director George Axelrod, has its own virtues apart from the novella.  Capote’s story is more bittersweet, more bleak, while the film holds more promise about life.  From my perspective, both works are outstanding in slightly different ways, and I recommend you both see the film and read the book.   Here, though, I will just concentrate on the film.

Actually, critics who do like the film sometimes have a hard time articulating why.  After all, the story about a frivolous, selfish girl hardly seems to have much of a plot to it, features some outlandish characters, and contains many implausible moments throughout.  Yet the film rises above all that and manages to capture something almost mythic about love.

As with Capote’s novella, the film story depicts the life of a glamorous young lady, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), as seen from the exclusively focalized perspective of a young writer, Paul Varjak (George Peppard), who is Holly’s neighbor.  Since much of the film is a profile of Holly Golightly, your appreciation of the tale will depend on the degree to which you find her interesting. 

The narrative goal takes awhile to crystallize, but it is clear from the outset that this is going to be a relationship narrative.  The question is: what will happen to the relationship between Paul and Holly?  The story goes through about seven stages, the first two of which provide the viewer with background information about the life of Holly.  The remaining five acts represent narrative episodes depicting Paul’s evolving relationship with Holly.

1.  Paul Meets Holly
The film starts with Paul moving into the apartment above Holly’s in an east side Manhattan (New York City) brownstone.  They soon chat and learn about each other.  Holly is a socialite, but she lives off the favors (“50 dollars for the powder room”) of men she meets at various night spots.  It’s never quite clear just how promiscuous Holly is, but her incessantly flirtatious nature suggest that she is used to seducing men for money, in a high class way, of course.  One evening she sneaks up the fire escape ladder and enters Paul’s apartment in order to flee one of her overly aggressive drunken conquests.  Wearing only a bathrobe, she chats with Paul, and they get to know each other. Holly says that she wants to earn money to look after her older brother, Fred, who is currently in the military but is evidently mentally impaired.  She also earns money by making weekly visits to a mafia narcotics boss, Salvatore Tomato, who is a prisoner in Sing Sing penitentiary north of New York City.  It later becomes evident that her visits are used to pass coded information between the mafioso and his fellow gangsters.

Though Paul has published some stories, he is unemployed and  financially supported by his lover, Emily Eustace Failenson (Patricia Neal), an older, married woman of considerable wealth. So both Holly and Paul are living off favors from the opposite sex – not exactly an admirable profile from either’s perspective in terms of a potential relationship between them.

2.  Holly the Socialite’s Party
Paul is invited the next day to party in Holly’s apartment, which turns out to be wild, almost ridiculous affair.  Here is where the burlesque comedy comes in, as we meet a cast of odd New York socialites.  A socialite friend of Holly introduces her to two wealthy men in her company, Rusty Trawler, whose underwhelming appearance is compensated for by his being the “ninth richest man in America under the age of fifty”, and a rich Brazilian patrician, José da Silva Pereira.  Paul meets Holly’s Hollywood agent, O. J. Berman (Martin Balsam), who tells Paul how he has taken Holly from the backwoods of Texas and groomed her to be a star.  But, he tells Paul, just when he had arranged a screen test for Holly, she had tripped off to New York City.  When Berman had asked her why, she responded, “when I find out what I want, I’ll let you know.”

At this point in the story, forty minutes into the film, we have enough information about Holly and Paul.  And we know that though Paul is relatively taciturn, he is very attracted to Holly.  But Holly is a will-o-the-wisp who calls everybody “darling”, even the taxi drivers.  The rest of the story concerns the progress made concerning their evolving relationship.

3.  “Doc” Golightly’s Story
The first hurdle is presented by the appearance of “Doc” Golightly (Buddy Epsen), a Texas veterinarian who shows up in New York City and reveals that he is Holly’s husband and wants to take her back to Texas. This is the first of the seemingly insurmountable hurdles that Paul faces in his quest for Holly. Paul is crushed to learn that Holly, then known as Lula Mae Barnes, had married “Doc” when she was only fourteen, and he reluctantly agrees to let him take Holly away.  But Holly tells Paul that her marriage had been annulled and sends “Doc” packing on a bus back to Texas.  OK, one hurdle cleared.

4.  The Rusty Trawler Affair
Paul and Holly get drunk together at a nightclub, and then Holly reveals to Paul that she intends to marry the wealthy Rusty Trawler for his money.  Again Paul is miffed.  However, luck comes Paul’s way in two forms.  He gets one of his stories published, and he learns that Rusty Trawler, who had run into financial straits, has gone off and married someone else for her money.  Another hurdle has been cleared.

5.  Paul and Holly on the Town
Now Paul and Holly go out to celebrate Paul’s new publication.  They visit Tiffany & Company’s famous jewelry store, where they have a wonderful interaction with a Tiffany salesman (memorably played by John McGiver), who treats their impecunious circumstances with respectful dignity. They also visit the famous New York Public Library and finally indulge their impish urges by robbing a five-and-dime store. By the end of their day, they are in love and embrace each other in a passionate kiss.  The next day Paul, now committed to Holly, breaks off his relationship with his friend Emily.

6.  The José Affair
Paul, now in the thralls of love, looks to find Holly, but she has gone out.  When he eventually finds her in the New York Public library, she is cold and indifferent to him.  She tells him that she has now decided to marry José da Silva Pereira for his money.  Incredulous, Paul can’t believe that he has been dumped so abruptly.  José, it turns out, is a gentleman and is sincere about wanting to marry Holly, so Paul can do nothing.  At this point Holly learns that her brother, Fred, has died in an accident, and is overcome with grief.  But Paul realizes that it is now up to José to comfort her.  Paul’s relationship with her is over.

7.  Finale
Time passes.  It seems that the better part of a year has gone by, and Paul has gotten a job and moved elsewhere. He gets an invitation from Holly to visit her and say good-bye just before she is to depart on a plane to Brazil. The meeting is cordial, but Holly is totally immersed in her future plans for life with José.  When after a farewell dinner out they return to Holly’s apartment, however, they are arrested by the police in connection with Holly’s relationship with mafia boss Salvatore Tomato.  Her paid weekly visits to Sing Sing prison had been used by the mafia to exchange coded messages, so Holly is jailed. 

Paul calls O. J. Berman in Hollywood, who arranges to get Holly released on bail and tells Paul to pick up Holly and put her up at a new address.  While collecting Holly’s things, including her cat, at her old apartment, Paul finds a message from José.  It turns out that having learned about Holly’s arrest, José’s concern for his family’s social standing has led him to break off their engagement.  When Paul picks up Holly in a taxi and the message is revealed to her, she tells him that she is going to Brazil anyway – now not to marry José, but just to explore an exciting new place and find more rich men to seduce.  She tells him that she is like her mongrel cat, a gypsy and eternally wandering free spirit.  Then she pitches her cat out of the taxi and tells it go look for mice.  Paul can’t believe that she could be so heartless.

"I love you; you belong to me,” he implores. 

“People don’t belong to people,” she responds. 

But he tells her: “People do belong to each other.  Because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.”

Then he says his final farewell and storms out of the taxi to go back and look for the cat. 

But for once, Holly has a change of heart.  She goes to him . . . and to retrieve the cat.

So what is it that makes Breakfast at Tiffany’s a great film?  It is all about the depiction of Holly Golightly and her way.  I have personally known a Holly Golightly, and probably you have known someone like that, too.  Holly uses people by charming them.  This is her habitual way of survival and is second nature to her. But she runs away from any real personal involvement.  Joni Mitchell’s song, “Cactus Tree”, comes to mind in this respect, a stanza of which reads:

    There's a lady in the city
    And she thinks she loves them all
    There's the one who's thinking of her
    There's the one who sometimes calls
    There's the one who writes her letters
    With his facts and figures scrawl
    She has brought them to her senses
    They have laughed inside her laughter
    Now she rallies her defenses
    For she fears that one will ask her
    For eternity
    And she's so busy being free

Some people have asked me, why would such a person like Holly be appealing?  When it comes down to it, isn’t she just an exploitative narcissist?  Well, I don’t think so.  The Holly Golightly here, as well as the one I knew, is completely guileless.  As O. J. Berman had told Paul, Holly is a phony, but at least she’s a “real phony”.  She believes in the dream world that she fabricates. Her social kisses are on the lips, not this French-inspired buss-on-the-cheek business. She innocently shares her thoughts with everyone, and she never intends harm (although her frequent disappointments with the men she has “dated” led her to designate most of them as “rats” or “super rats”). She invited intimacy with everyone, and this part was sincere, but she was afraid to go further and hold on to something. This combination of openness and invited intimacy – carrying an assumption that everyone is inherently good, combined with an innocent vulnerability – is what makes Holly appealing.  And Audrey Hepburn’s performance embodies this ideal image of vulnerable, timorous openness perfectly.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s features a number of established Hollywood performers, including Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Epsen, and John McGiver.  But their portrayals, though emphatic and effective in their way, were rather schematic and in stark contrast to Audrey Hepburn’s genuineness.  George Peppard’s restrained performance as Paul is a good complement to Hepburn’s. He effectively portrays the barely concealed anxiety of a frustrated man in love who is not supposed to reveal his feelings.

In fact, though, it is Audrey Hepburn’s performance that makes the movie.  Her acting style is so natural to her visible persona that one doesn’t really think of her as a real actress.  She just seems to be herself every time.  But when she acts, she inserts herself so perfectly into the role, that it makes a natural fit with the interactive context.  The attraction people feel is to her whole being and not just to her physical appearance. Perhaps this was why she was nominated for a best acting award for most of her film performances over her career.  Audrey Hepburn even does a good job singing the evocative song, “Moon River”, which became a classic.  But for some reason Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the lead role, and while Ms. Monroe might have given a decent performance, it would have been different and resulted in a different film.  I can’t believe that she could have conveyed the essence of Holy Golightly’s personality as well as Audrey Hepburn did.

In the real world, the Holly Golightlys out there invariably run away in the end, always looking for their next adventure, but never finding true happiness. But films, particularly great films, reflect our dreams more than actual reality.  Rather than run away, the will-of-the-wisp Holly lingers in Breakfast in Tiffany’s, . . . and in our own dreams, too.

★★★★