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.

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.

A delightfully sophisticated farce written and produced by George Axelrod and very nicely directed by Richard Quine, who seemed to have a knack for this sort of thing. Jack Lemmon is the New York cartoonist and a confirmed bachelor who goes to a bachelor dinner one night and wakes up in the morning married to the girl who popped out of the cake. And who could blame him since she's played by the delectable Virna Lisi who is not only gorgeous but a great comedienne as well. The problem is Lemmon doesn't want a wife, even one who looks like Lisi - hence the title.

Axelrod is the man who gave us "The Seven Year Itch" but this is better. It's beautifully designed and has a great supporting cast. Terry-Thomas is the British butler appalled by Lemmon's newly acquired martial status, the great Eddie Mayehoff is his lawyer, (the movies never really used Mayehoff to his full effect), and Claire Trevor is Mayehoff's wife. It's never as black as it ought to be, (indeed, it's highly coloured in the way many American comedies of the period were), but it's consistently funny and enjoyable.