How To Murder Your Wife ( HTMYW) is not a movie to be taken seriously. It is a spoof of spy movies and sex comedies. . I can imagine there would be a lot of women who would not care for this movie ( and a lot of guys who do ( myself included)). It's about a cartoonist named Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon) who gets drunk and marries the girl who comes out of the cake ( the luscious Virna Lisi). Here is the thing: Lisi ( who as an Italian speaks no English) actually takes good care of Stanley ( if the writers wanted to be nasty, they could have made her a shrew ( like his lawyer's wife played by Claire Trevor)). Spoilers ahead: What it is about is killing his wife in a comic strip so the character can go back to being a spy. For that reason Stanley gets indicted for killing his wife ( she actually ran away because she ( like everyone else) thinks he will kill her). He admits to killing her, but gets acquitted ( to send a message to the jurors wives). What is important is Stanley really loves his wife which he admitted to his nasty woman hating butler ( Terry-Thomas) who along with Lisi ( for different reasons of course) steals the movie. Lisi's character who is called "Mrs. Ford ( you never learn her first name), eventually wins the battle of the sexes because even Terry-Thomas says "If he ( Stanley) can stand her, so can I." He then meets her mom and falls for her. What is important is almost any guy would love to be with Virna Lisa ( think Marilyn Monroe meets Sophia Loren), but she is actually decent ( she will not sleep with him at the end without the ring on her finger ( which he has)), and actually makes his life better ( even though she gets him kicked out of his men's only club by showing up there), and has him gain weight. What you see throughout the movie is a lot of unhappy men who picked the wrong woman ( since all are successful ( except the jurors), it makes you think they married not out of love but for social status) so they are miserable ( that is why they join clubs to get away from them). Stanley ends up with an entirely different kind of woman and learns to love her because of who she is. Besides if the choice is getting drunk with the guys or spending the night with Virna Lisi, the choice is very easy. 10/10 stars.

How to Murder Your Wife (1965)Jack Lemmon is sharp and almost single handedly keeps this deliberate farce from falling completely apart. It's a slick production, very well filmed, but it's also mindlessly sexist from our point of view, and downright stupid at times, too, for other reasons.That's why a lot of people like it. This is really the flip side to the 1960s, pre-Woodstock. As a kind of set-up for this you might watch the truly amazing 1960 Jack Lemmon movie, "The Apartment," which has different stylistic intentions but has an odd overlap in plot. In both movies Lemmon plays a bachelor in corporate America when a woman unexpectedly enters his life, and his living space. But how different could two movies be in how this is handled? The earlier one, a masterpiece by Billy Wilder, is about both the shenanigans of the white collar set, and the boorish sexism they drag with them and about an alternative, in Lemmon's character, finding genuine human affection and standing up for what he feels. In this later movie Lemmon's character is just as silly as his peers, and the scenes are variations of girl watching and comic sexing up of this man's manly world.Granted, this is a comedy, and a clever one. The odd hook is our hero is a popular comic strip artist, and when he gets an idea he enacts it in detail with his butler taking pictures of the scenes. That way he gets fresh ideas on how to illustrate the crazy events, but of course he also has to pretend to do some crazy stuff in public. It's pretty hilarious on that level, and when the problem of the woman enters the equation, he tries to turn it into material for his comics. That works for awhile.The actors around Lemmon are not all convincing, though his butler is rather wonderfully affected. The women, not surprisingly, are all pretty shallow and decorative, the main one being a true Italian import, the actress Virna Lisi, who thankfully did mostly Italian movies before drifting into television. She is meant to be a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and does pretty well at it, but you do wonder what we need a Marilyn Monroe look-alike for three years after her death.Anyway, this kind of movie is an acquired taste, and I'm drifting more and more away from this style, having seen a dozen or so in the last few months. Luckily the Netflix version is nice and sharp and is full widescreen. I just can't do as another reviewer wrote, "I laugh I lust," and so I'm maybe unqualified to enjoy this movie, whatever its comedic charms.

This film strives desperately to be funny and only occasionally succeeds. Oddly, Jack Lemmon mostly functions as a straight man in those moments. The comedy is supplied by one of the other actors: Terry-Thomas as his valet, Eddie Mayehoff as his incompetent, hen-pecked lawyer, Clair Trevor as the lawyer's wife, Virna Lisi as his own wife or Sidney Blackstone as a frequently drunk judge proclaiming that he is "as sober as a judge." The premise -- that Lemmon's character is a dedicated bachelor who accidentally marries the woman (Lisi) that rose out of a cake at a drunken, guys-only party -- might be funny but it usually isn't. Ms. Lisi, an Italian beauty who made a couple of Hollywood films, is asked to be beautiful, speak Italian in rapid outbursts and to perform a sexy dancing routine at one point in the story. She does those three things efficiently. Lemmon's role is absurd to begin with, and it doesn't get a lot better as the film progresses. It doesn't much matter that the story is ridiculous. Many successful comedies are ridiculous. Rather, the film often fails because the effort to provoke laughter is simply too strenuous.

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.