Homicidal Bash

How to 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.

Next morning, beside himself, he finds the blonde--with a wedding ring on her finger. He has not only had his cake, he has married her too. Some joke, he begins bravely. How would she like a divorce? The blonde smiles agreeably and noncommittally shrugs: 'Non capisco." She no spek Engleesh. He non parla Italiano.

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!) into cement mixers. "A tomb of gloop from a gloppeta-gloppeta machine," he schemes dreamily.

In the murder plot itself, and the 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 Limoges.

A bigger surprise is Italian Actress Lisi, an import whose dramatic talent graced two dozen European films before Hollywood discovered her smartly turned sense of humor. Speaking scant English, newly blonde and lacquered to the customary high gloss, she translates her U.S. movie debut into a triumph of personality that will probably establish a long-term policy of lend-Lisi. She is devastating to behold as a centerpiece, though she somehow makes hard-sell sex seem at least as classy as caviar. She is delightful to listen to when she explains with gestures the stunning miscarriage of justice by which she lost a beauty contest. And her party dance, an uninhibited display of body English atop a piano, should provide a semester or two of isometric homework for the eager starlets who used to emulate Marilyn Monroe.

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