The Man Who Understood Women

One of the movies that returned to the FXM lineup not too long ago is The Man Who Understood Women. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 9:10 AM, and doesn't seem to be on DVD, so the FXM showing is your rare opportunity to catch it.

The movie starts off in Nice, France, in 1956. Ann Garantier (Leslie Caron) is in the waiting room of a hospital together with one of her husband's friends and colleagues Norman (Harry Ellerbe). Apparently something's happened to the husband, and Ann may have to answer questions. Cut to the flashback of how they all ended up here....

Willi Bauche (Henry Fonda) is an Orson Welles-type Hollywood personality: a director and sometimes actor, screenwriter, and producer who makes movies that are acclaimed but go way over budget and cause problems for the studios as a result. He gets fired from the studio, but in meeting his friend G.K. Brody he sees French-born actress Ann Garantier making a screen test.

Willi is immediately taken with Ann, and thinks he can make Ann a star. But he's also going to do it his way, which means engaging in all sorts of mildly underhanded shenanigans with the various Hollywood types. But eventually Willi is able to get Ann in a movie, and then another, with Ann becoming quite successful. The two get married, but it's not necessarily a match made in heaven as Willie is still scheming on their wedding night instead of consummating the marriage.

Things go on like this until Ann decides that she's had enough of Hollywood and wants to go back to her native France. Willi gets the idea that perhaps they can make a movie in France, and so goes along with her to the French Riviera. On the train, Ann sees Maj. Marco Ranieri (Cesare Danova), a dashing soldier of fortune. He being dashing and she going through difficulties with her husband, you know that the two are going to fall in love.

Willi knows as well that Ann is going to fall in love with the Major, so he calls up G.K. back in Hollywood. Apparently they knew a guy Soprano (Bern Hoffman) who got deported back to his native Sicily, and could be of use as a sort of private detective to follow Ann and Marco, and bring Ann back to Willi. Soprano meets a drunken Baron (Edwin Jerome), and the two go off in search of the couple.

However, the Baron is a hopeless romantic, and when he sees Ann and Marco in love, he feels the two can't be separated. What this means is that while Willi might have been able to countenance Marco dying in an "accident", the Baron won't let that happen, instead preferring that the two lovers die together, something Willi doesn't want to happen at all for the obvious reasons.

The Man Who Understood Women is material that sounds like it should be good or at least interesting. But instead, it winds up flat. Somehow I couldn't really bring myself to care about these characters, none of whom seemed very appealing. The movie also moved slowly, even though the version FXM ran was only 100 minutes. (IMDb says it's 105 minutes, and was supposedly edited down to that.) It doesn't help that FXM once again ran a print that was letterboxed and pillarboxed. Having said that, the reviews I've read are even more scathing than what I thought of it. So perhaps this is one of those movies where even more than others you need to watch and judge for yourself.

As I said at the beginning, I couldn't find this one available on DVD (or streaming), so if you do want to watch, it's FXM or nothing.