How to Save a Marriage... and Ruin Your Life

Stella Stevens died earlier this year, so it was unsurprising that TCM decided to honor her by having an entire day of her movies in Summer Under the Stars. This included a couple of those 60s sex comedies that I hadn't seen before, and I added at least one of them to my DVR: How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Stevens plays Carol Corman, a shop girl at one of those old-style New York department stores that have largely left other cities, replaced by chains, especially on the lower end of the market. But this is one of those upscale stores that does deliveries. At the end of one day, she offers to make a delivery, no one else being able to do it on their way home. That delivery is an engraved humidor, to one Muriel Laszlo (Anne Jackson).

Carol goes to Muriel's apartment and knocks on the door. Answering isn't Muriel, but Harry Hunter (Eli Wallach). The only thing is, Harry isn't Muriel's husband, which in and of itself isn't such a big deal. But Harry has a wife Mary (Katharine Bard), meaning that Muriel is Harry's mistress. Much worse, however, is that Harry is also an executive at the department store where Carol works, and the two recognize each other. The next day at the office, Harry calls in Carol and tells her she might be promotion material.

Cut to a shot of Mary walking into the office. Except that it's not her husband's office, it's that of another executive, and Harry's best friend, David Sloane (Dean Martin). Mary is able to confied in David in part because of his being Harry's best friend so knowing Mary as well, and in part because he claims to be a confirmed bachelor. Perhaps David can come up with some way to intercede and get Harry to drop the affair. In talking to Harry, he suggests David see the mistress.

Meanwhile, David and Carol wind up in the elevator together now that she's working on the same floor as him. She's taken by him, and it's not after David's conversation with Harry that he figures Carol must be the mistress. With that in mind, and finding Carol nice looking, David gets the idea that perhaps he should seduce Carol. If she winds up with him, he'll have taking Harry's mistress away from him, thereby solving Harry's mistress problem.

Of course, we all know that Carol is in fact not Harry's mistress. And when Harry learns that David has tried to "help" him by seducing his mistress, he gets the bad idea that Muriel is seeing someone else, which is also not true. But Carol and Muriel eventually meet again, and in talking, they learn that the two women have boyfriends who know each other, learning the deceit. They then concoct one of the TV sitcom-type plots to get back at their boyfriends....

How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life starts off with one of those old-fashioned MOR songs used in any number of movies from that era, notably the Oscar-winning theme song "The Shadow of Your Smile" from The Sandpipers. It gives an immediate vibe of being the sort of innocent romantic comedy in the vein of the Doris Day sex comedies from the early 1960s. But with the crumbling of the Production Code, it's also trying to keep up with the times. Unfortunately, it's not doing so very successfully, and feels like it's dated a heck of a lot more than those earlier movies.

If How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life has any bright points, they're in the production design: the fashions and colors are a fairly spectacular rendition of what people in the 1960s thought 1960s glamour looked like. That makes the movie lovely to look at. It's just a shame that it's all in the service of a fairly witless plot.