How to Murder Your Wife (1965)

How to Murder Your Wife (1965)

starring Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi

directed by Richard Quine

118 minutes

watched on Kanopy

Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon) wakes up the day after a friend's bachelor party and finds out that he got married the night before. He tries to get the marriage annulled but Harold, his lawyer, thinks he is better off married and refuses to help him out. Stanley resigns himself to the married life. He loses Charles (Terry Thomas), his butler, who refuses to work for a married couple.

Stanley is a cartoonist with a syndicated strip. The main character in his comic strip gets married. The strip changes from being action and adventure to being about the married couple. Stanley can't seem to adjust to married life. He contemplates killing off the wife in the comic strip. His wife finds out about it and disappears.

Stanley gets arrested for murder, when the strip in which the husband murders the wife runs in the newspaper. Harold does a poor job of defending Stanley in court. Stanley fires Harold and mounts his own defense. 

Thoughts

I first saw this movie in the 1980s. I'm pretty sure that it has been at least two decades and possibly more like three-and-a-half since I last saw it. I didn't remember all the details but there were a number of moments in the movie that I recalled as I watched them. I had my doubts (before watching it this time) and for the most they seem to have been justified.

Notes

Claire Trevor played Edna, Harold's wife, in this movie. She was also in Stagecoach (1939), Born to Kill (1947), and Borderline (1950), all of which I watched in the past 12 months. There are a number of other films she was in that I either have seen (but not recently) and want to watch again or that I have not seen yet. This is one of just four movies she made in the 1960s.

Eddie Mayehoff provided my favorite performance in this movie as Harold. He isn't in it anywhere near as much as Jack Lemmon or some of the other cast members but he plays a key role in the movie. Mayehoff has just 16 screen credits according to IMDb, including three movie with Martin & Lewis.

Mel Keefer drew the comic strips that were attributed to Stanley Ford. He worked as a comic strip artist for decades. His longest running strip was Mac Divot which ran from 1955 to 1975. Jordan Lanski wrote Mac Divot. Keefer also worked on numerous animated cartoons including Johnny Quest, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Groovie Goolies, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Spider-Woman, and Blackstar. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95.