Sex and the Single Girl

Tomorrow in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, we get a day of the movies of Natalie Wood. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before is Sex and the Single Girl. It comes on tomorrow at 11:30 AM, and since I recorded it the last time it was on, I decided to watch it to do a post on it for the upcoming showing.

Tony Curtis gets nominal top billing as Bob Weston. Bob is the managing editor of Stop magazine, a magazine that at one point in the distant past had been a serious analysis magazine, but at some point in a desperate attempt to boost circulation, turned to writing much more salacious articles. One of those articles was about young psychologist/sexologist Helen Brown (Natalie Wood), who wrote a best-selling book called Sex and the Single Girl about how a single girl can in fact have it all.

Brown and her colleagues at the institute were of course aghast at that article, but Weston thinks it didn't go far enough. In fact, he believes that Brown has no real sexual experience at all, at least not of the sort she wrote about, and he's going to set about proving it for an article for Stop. Of course, there's an obvious problem in that there's no way Brown is ever going to consent to doing an interview with the good people at Stop, so Bob is going to have to come up with some way to get that interview.

As for Bob's personal life, he lives in an aparment next to Frank Broderick (Henry Fonda) and Frank's wife Sylvia (Lauren Bacall). Frank markets high-class women's hosiery, and although he's devoted to Sylvia, he's convinced that she believes Frank is interested in every woman he sees when in fact he's only got a professional interest in what sort of stocking are on these women's legs. It's the source for a lot of bickering.

And this gives Bob an idea. He'll go see Dr. Brown pretending to be Frank, and telling Brown Frank's problems with Sylvia. This, somehow, will trip Brown up and give Bob the material he needs for his story. In fact, Brown seems to be incredibly handsy with Bob, much more than I would imagine most psychologists being. She concludes, based on Bob-as-Frank's descriptions, that Sylvia is the problem. She'd like to meet Sylvia, something which Bob doesn't want because that will give the game away.

Eventually Brown does something I'd think is a severe violation of professional ethics and approaches Sylvia herself. Bob tries to get his girlfriend to pass herself off as Sylvia, and his secretary joins in, leading to three "Sylvias" which further perplexes Brown. And if that's a bad violation of ethics, Bob is falling in love with Helen, while Helen has feelings for Bob she doesn't want to explore for the obvious ethical reasons.

Sex and the Single Girl is a farce that takes its name from the book by Helen Gurley Brown, but as far as I'm aware Wood's character is nothing like the real-life Brown was and the movie is nothing like the book, Warner Bros. only using the title because they thought it would sell tickets.

There's a lot in Sex and the Single Girl that people will enjoy, but I have to admit that there's a fair amount that I had a problem with. I've mentioned the lack of professional ethics that Wood's Helen Brown has; this is all played for laughs and I can't imagine her colleagues at the institute being very accepting of what she's doing. Tony Curtis' Bob is another of his schmoozy schemers, a sort of character that I can find deeply unlikeable when it doesn't work; here, there are times that I didn't like it at all. The finale, which involved a madcap car chase, also didn't work for me.

But again, I think this is material that will appeal to some people, especially if you're interested in how the mid-1960s saw themselves. The movie, having been released by Warner Bros., is unsurpisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.