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I really want to recommend this movie to you.

Sure, it has a weak third act which pounds a particularly misogynistic message. And the end is so formulaic it hurts. But up until then, it classifies as among the best of comedies.

I have a particular admiration for it as what I think is the first example of a cartoonist whose drawings interweave with his life. Its a clever idea at root but handled with extra sophistication here.

The setup is that our hero (Jack Lemmon) is a cartoonist who draws himself in his strip as a sort of James Bond character. But before he draws each strip, he actually acts it out as movies that we see in the movie within the movie. (How he hires the actors and arranges the locations is a detail left unexplained.)

Thus, strip and life have a relationship within the story proper. Much is made of conflating the movie, the life depicted in the movie, the strip, and the movies within.

He ends up with an unwanted (well, sort of) wife and acts out her murder. Since she left in a huff, he has no defense when his readership (the whole country it seems) accuses him of real murder.

The pinnacle of this confabulation comes when his butler comes to the realization that the murder has actually been real with the enactment an alibi. Things go downhill from there. But until that point, this is sublime, a comic "Draughtsman's Contract."

See it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Jack Lemmon is a cartoonist who figures out "How to Murder Your Wife" in this 1965 film also starring Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas, Claire Trevor, Eddie Mayehoff, Max Showalter and Sidney Blackmer. Lemmon is Stanley Ford, a successful cartoonist of a dashing James Bond-like figure. Ford leads the perfectly structured life in his gorgeous Manhattan townhouse. He has a man servant (Thomas), his weight his perfect, he works out, and he has a nice social life. One night that all changes. While drunk, a gorgeous blond (Lisi) comes out of a cake at a stag party, and Stanley marries her immediately. It turns out she can't speak a word of Englsh. She's an incredible Italian cook so his weight goes up. Under the influence of the domineering wife (Trevor) of his attorney (Mayehoff), she checks in on him at his club and gets him thrown out; she shops until she drops; she redecorates in chintz; his man servant leaves. His life is a disaster.

What Stanley does, his cartoon character does. His cartoon character was a swinging bachelor who got married when Stanley did. Now it's time for the character to kill his wife and go back to being a swinging bachelor. Stanley always does his sketches from photographs of himself actually performing the various tasks in his cartoon. Now he gets a blond mannequin and has the character kill his wife. Just one problem - Stanley's wife actually leaves with no forwarding address, and Stanley has the pictures to show himself killing her.

This film is totally sexist and misogynistic, but despite the weak ending, the concept is funny, and Lemmon is very good as a man watching his well-oiled life unravel before him. It's all about how a woman takes over a man's life and runs the show, and that does often seem to be true, though it's overstated here for the sake of comedy. The secret of any kind of marital bliss is some sort of compromise here and there, and by the end of the film, the characters are coming around.

I'm not crazy about most of these '60s battle of the sexes comedies, and it's no wonder that Jack Lemmon didn't really like making them. This one has some good scenes, like Lemmon being photographed carrying out different situations (with hired actors) for his cartoon. Terry-Thomas is quite funny, Lisi is beautiful, and Trevor is good in the role of an overbearing wife. Mayehoff makes a good henpecked husband.

Pleasant but not great.

A comedy that, if made today, would likely be under attack from every politically correct special interest group you could name. The title alone would bring out the picket signs. That observation aside, "How to Murder Your Wife" is a very funny comedy in which the supporting cast outshine the stars. Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, and Terry Thomas are all good, but it is Eddie Mayehoff and Claire Trevor who really make this one memorable. There never was a henpecked bumbler like the great Mayehoff, and no one could match Trevor as a...well, you know, the word that begins with a B.

This was the last of the three comedies that Jack Lemmon made in the middle 1960s that he hated. Like GOOD NEIGHBOR SAM (and not like the abysmal UNDER THE YUM YUM TREE) HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE had a clever script and good production. Lemmon played a successful cartoonist who carefully scripts and photos the scenes he will use in his detective adventure strip. He lives in a townhouse, complete with top rate valet (Terry-Thomas) and has a wonderful life as a bachelor. But while attending a stag party, he meets Virna Lisi, and takes her home. Apparently he has married her (the groom at the stag party had broken up with his fiancé before the party, and throws the wedding ring out - and Lemmon uses it). As a result Lisi starts domesticating him, and Terry Thomas walks out. Lemmon uses the changes in his lifestyle in the comic strip, but finally he revolts and kills off the comic strip version of Lisi. When Lisi sees this she walks out, but everyone thinks that Lemmon killed her. So the scene is set for a murder trial.

This is not a film for feminists. It takes a dim view at the effect of domestication on Lemmon (and his lawyer, a hysterically funny Eddie Mayehoff). But I point out that before the end Lemmon does admit he misses the domestication. Even Terry-Thomas gives into it at the conclusion. It still a good comedy, a worthy minor work if not one of the high points in Lemmon's acting career.

The comic strips in the film were actually drawn by the late Alex Toth. Alex Toth (June 25, 1928 – May 27, 2006), pronounced with a long "o", was a professional cartoonist. He began his career in comic strips and comic books but is best known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

His work included Super Friends, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost and Birdman.

Toth's work has been resurrected in the late-night, adult-themed spinoffs on Cartoon Network: Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

Some newspapers even carried 10 days of teaser Bash Brannigan strips which got sillier and sillier with insider Hollywood comments each day of its' short run.

It was one of those things life blesses us with. - Sparky