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At one point in "How to Murder Your Wife," a doctor explains to the unhappily married Jack Lemmon that a pill he subscribes is perfectly harmless unless taken with alcohol. Mixed with liquor, it makes a person engage in strange behaviors before collapsing on the floor. Appropriately enough, the people who made this movie--including, incredibly, George Axelrod, the screenwriter for "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's"--must have slipped such a pill into their own drink before working on the film.

I mean it. Quite a few movies from the mid- to late-'60s were like this, showing the influence of, shall we say, something a bit more stimulating than the average pharmaceutical. And while this movie may not be as far out as "Magical Mystery Tour," it doesn't look like the work of a mind that was totally sober. The plot is absurdly illogical in an almost dreamlike fashion, and although it is presented as a comedy, it thinks it has stumbled upon deep truths about the war between the sexes.

Lemmon stars as a popular cartoonist who has performers play out the story-lines he devises, after which he uses photos from the act to help him draw his comic strip, a serialized adventure. This is an intriguing idea, and the scenes involving the design of his strip are the best parts of the film. I wish they had been attached to a movie that maintained this level of creativity throughout.

Lemmon wakes up one morning in bed with a beautiful Italian woman (Virna Lisi) and discovers that in a drunken stupor at a bachelor party the previous night, they had gotten married to each other. This is not exactly an original plot device, but it's something that normally comes at the end of a movie, as a kind of cinematic punchline. It makes for a weak opener, because it's a situation that should be easy to resolve. The lengths to which the characters go to avoid doing the obvious is a wonder to behold. The film is heavy on Idiot Plot--the problem that would go away instantly if the characters weren't idiots--and it continues well beyond the initial setup, all the way to the inane courtroom scene at the climax.

First, there's Lemmon's lawyer friend (Eddie Mayehoff) who is apparently the only lawyer alive in New York. How do we know? Well, for one thing, the mansion-dwelling Lemmon never once considers fishing for a new lawyer, despite the fact that this one is a cartoonishly inept milquetoast kept on a leash by his domineering wife. For another, in the course of the movie he will serve as different types of lawyers, of which criminal defense attorney is only the last.

Terry-Thomas, who narrates the early scenes, plays Lemmon's butler/manservant/photographer. Fearing that the marriage will upset their gay relationship (in the "happy" sense...perhaps), he threatens to quit if Lemmon doesn't have the marriage annulled, which of course is exactly what Lemmon wants to do but finds himself strangely unable to. This is where the film begins to get surreal and dreamlike, as Lemmon can't accomplish what should be an amazingly simple task because all the other characters keep talking loudly over him and not listening to what he has to say except to misunderstand it.

The filmmakers must have gotten so hung up on the central premise--a cartoonist thinking up ways to murder his wife--that they didn't bother to come up with a plausible path to get there. Logic and common sense get thrown to the wind so that the Lemmon character can dream up a murder scenario for a situation with several perfectly sensible alternatives.

I have to admit I expected the murder plot to be more fun. I imagined some elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme (this is a cartoonist, after all), or perhaps a series of plans that keep going wrong. Evidently, it's just not that type of comedy. It seems to promise a colorful outcome with its "gloppita-gloppita" machine shown in the first scene. Though crucial, the machine plays a smaller role than we might expect from a movie titled "How to Murder Your Wife." The film has other ambitions, and they come off heavy-handed and insulting.

Apart from its flaws as a comedy and its far-fetched plot, what really got to me was the film's shameless misogyny. It develops as its principal theme a sort of bizarro reverse feminism, calling for the men in American society to rise up and assert themselves against the women who have enslaved them in unhappy marriages. And this isn't just some self-consciously ironic attempt to turn women's lib on its head: the movie seems at least half-serious on this point. It attacks women's traditional roles not out of sympathy for the women, who are depicted as mindless but malevolent creatures, but to give the men the freedom to pursue their ambitions, such as hanging out with their buddies at their all-male clubs, in peace.

I'm used to seeing older movies with sentiments that now look a bit dated, but I wasn't sure what to make of this one. It came out at a time when many of the old gender stereotypes in Hollywood were breaking down. If the film was intended as a backlash, it's a pretty lame one. I don't know whether the weird scene in the courtroom at the end was supposed to be funny or inspiring, but it succeeds at being neither of those things, and it leaves us with a peculiar feeling of discomfort.

Cartoonist Stanley Ford loves bachelorhood, he enjoys his life, he has a butler to serve him, he can get girls, and he likes a drink or two. Then one night he's at a bachelor party and the beautiful Virna Lisi pops up out of the cake, his life is about to change. For when he wakes up in the morning, he finds he has married her, and to compound his problems, she doesn't speak any English.

As a big Jack Lemmon fan I have to say I'm very disappointed in this picture, it's essentially a two joke movie that wastes Lemmon and Terry-Thomas' talent. The first half of the picture plays heavy on the fact that the new Mrs Ford only speaks Italian, this sets us up for a number of funny sequences, particularly when Claire Trevor enters the fray as Edna, but on it goes, and on it goes... We then get to watch as Stanley gains weight due to Mrs Ford's willingness to cook for her new husband, with Lemmon reduced to playing Stanley as an exasperated buffoon, henpecked within an inch of his manhood.

The second half of the picture, as the title suggests, sees Stanley grow a spine and decide to deal with his problem by killing the wife. You would think that this sets the picture up for a number of riotous sequences as Stanley tries to do away with her, but sadly no, it's just the one joke that fails to light up the picture in any shape or form. The run in to the finale is marginally saved by the always reliable Eddie Mayehoff, but come the credits you wonder if the film ever meant to be a full blown comedy in the first place? 4/10 for Mayehoff and Terry-Thomas' opening scenes.

The four stars are for the beautiful and charming Virna Lisi.

I can't believe the great George Axelrod wrote this. It is totally unfunny and not the slightest bit clever.

Even more appalling is seeing film great Claire Trevor embarrass herself.

People say Under the Yum Yum Tree is Lemmon's worst film. It is far better than this.

One fine day Jack Lemmon, an American Bertie Wooster who earns a living as a cartoonist finds himself married to the gorgeous Virna Lisi. It's such a shock that his Jeeves played by Terry-Thomas walks out on him. But that's only the beginning of Lemmon's troubles.

As P.G. Wodehouse was still alive when this film came it would be interesting to speculate what he thought of it. Probably not all that much. Certainly he never considered a libel suit for ripping off his famous fictional pair, he probably though that a suit would give the film unwanted publicity.

It's not that How To Murder Your Wife is a horrible film, but a great cast was assembled and it laid an ostrich size omelet in an attempt to be satirical.

Lemmon goes to a bachelor party in which the gorgeous Lisi pops out of a cake and dances. The next day he wakes up with her, but unlike in the past, there's a little gold band on his finger. Terry-Thomas has been used to Lemmon's women, but he's got a firm rule against working for married people. Jeeves I'm sure would concur.

If you're going to be married why not enjoy it if it's to Virna Lisi. But she's cramping his style and he takes his frustration out in his cartoon strip. Later when Lisi discovers she's his literary inspiration for fictional homicide, she walks out and Lemmon's accused of her real murder.

Eddie Mayehoff and Claire Trevor play Lemmon's married friends and Trevor tries to help Lisi with her English. She in turn helps Trevor loosen up. That particular scene is the best in the film.

Lemmon wasn't particularly crazy about this film and I can see why. Still for Jack Lemmon fans it shouldn't be missed. The film could have used a lot more of Terry-Thomas.

This scatty, slightly black, would-be sex-comedy stars Jack Lemmon as Stanley Ford, a New-York-based, popular, syndicated cartoonist whose meta-creation of himself as a character called Bash Brannigan, acts out James Bond-type fantasies in real-life locations, photographed for storyboarding purposes by his loyal, pukka, English butler, Charles, played by Terry Thomas.

We quickly see that his comic alter-ego is just a manifest extension of Stanley's own persona as a footloose and fancy free single man, living in apparent luxury in his swank apartment although probably symbolically, the neighbourhood is incomplete with construction work going on all around it. He spends all his time either cartooning, lording it up at his male-only private members' club complete with its own indoor running track and appearing at uptown soirées which usually results in him becoming pie-eyed and requiring to be tucked into bed by Charles.

That all changes when at one particular party, he really ties one on and wakens up the next day to find out that he's somehow gotten married to the glamorous young Italian girl who in time dishonoured fashion jumped out of the big celebration birthday cake, scantily clad and singing an inane song.

This apparently was young Italian actress Virna Lisa's debut appearance in Hollywood. Sad to say, she gets very little to do other than canoodle constantly with Lemmon and exaggeratedly display her Italian temper and accent, usually wearing as few clothes as possible.

So we go through the whole rigmarole of Stan lambasting his dozy lawyer to extricate himself from the marriage before he finally dreams up an idea to do away with her completely. Then, in justification for the otherwise meaningless extended opening scene to the movie, we see him simulate his murderous plan, which involves him rather dubiously spiking her drink, with Charles faithfully snapping his every step. However, at this point, Lisi, who somehow still loves him, cottons onto his plan and broken-heartedly disappears back to her mother, the outcome of which is that our Stan goes on trial for his absent wife's murder, the evidence apparently being his next cartoon for the papers.

As you can tell, it's all hughly ludicrous but not very humorous, incorporating a thinks-it's-clever extended courtroom scene and laced with the rather tasteless sexism and chauvinism of the time, today it's a rather awkward, tedious and slightly unpleasant watch, unredeemed by the supposed happy ending.

Lemmon mugs and clowns his way through this silly story as he does, Thomas is as smarmy as ever while Miss Lisi really should have had a word with her agent after subjecting herself to this, her first feature in Tinsel Town. Perhaps audiences of the day lapped up this sort of thing, but today it looks very dated indeed.

The movie has a generally funny premise, and Virna Lisi truly shines, but the second half tanks.

I was willing to go along for the ride until the courtroom scene. The social commentary is heavy-handed to the point of preachy, and it's a long scene. The message is sexist even for 1960's audiences. A few others called it a "battle of the sexes" but it's not, because the point of view of women is not represented at all.

I could get into just how sexist it is, but I won't. Just don't bother.