This frothy thing is a charming movie (script by Comden and Green) and lots of fun. Shirley MacLaine is the strictly brought-up, naive cutie pie who manages unwittingly to marry a series of hopelessly poor men, each of whom becomes fabulously wealthy. We're talking big names too -- Dean Martin, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, et al -- not all of whom are associated with successful comedies.
Her first love, in their dusty little town, is the hapless Dick Van Dyke who is perfectly content to spend his time fishing and reading Thoreau, while the arrogant Dean Martin lords it over Van Dyke and everyone else. MacClaine chooses to marry Van Dyke, perhaps partly because he's so abjectly mired in poverty, just to frustrate her mother who has advised her that "money is the root of all." Van Dyke suffers a road-to-Damascus experience and builts his shabby hardware store into a monstrously successful supermarket, then drops dead from the effort, leaving MacClaine a mountain of money. The pattern holds through her subsequent marriages.
Well, I suppose Mitchum doesn't start out poor. He starts out fabulously wealthy, a Howard Hughes figure, distant and stern. But he warms to MacClaine, sells off his business enterprises and retires to a little farm with her. He celebrates his retirement with a few hayseed neighbors, gets a little drunk, and tries to milk the bull instead of the cow. "Melrose! FORGIVE ME!", he howls before being kicked for a field goal. He leaves her millions.
In some ways the funniest and most satiric episode involves Newman as a Paris taxi driver who is an insane painter filled with contempt for bourgeois morality and greed. He lives in a shabby studio apartment in which a dozen large crane-like arms with paint brushes on the ends are activated by his "sonic palette." Newman bangs drums, operates jack hammers, and makes other random noises and the brushes slap away randomly at a large canvas. The painting are worth nothing. However, MacClaine accidentally activates the brushes by playing a record of Mendelssohn's "Spring Song." Newman has an epiphany while gawking at the brushes now oscillating in harmony. He now begins to produce machine-processed painting by playing classical music and jazz. They're no longer "his" work, although he runs around in a frenzy with a conductor's baton. The value of his paintings soars. They soar even more after the machines conspire to beat him to death. I can only think of one other movie, "The Prize", in which Newman has been in the least funny, fine dramatic actor that he is. He throws himself into the role of mad artist with amazing gusto.
I guess I won't go on with this because, as must be evident, the plot has a lot of characters and is a mosaic of sub-plots. Let me add that, in some prints, in a scene in which MacClaine and Mitchum enter a ballroom in evening clothes, she does a pirouette and drops to her knees, at which point her bodice slips a little, but just enough. I only add that for the pre-verts among us. There was no joy in it for me. I've never had an impure thought.
Her first love, in their dusty little town, is the hapless Dick Van Dyke who is perfectly content to spend his time fishing and reading Thoreau, while the arrogant Dean Martin lords it over Van Dyke and everyone else. MacClaine chooses to marry Van Dyke, perhaps partly because he's so abjectly mired in poverty, just to frustrate her mother who has advised her that "money is the root of all." Van Dyke suffers a road-to-Damascus experience and builts his shabby hardware store into a monstrously successful supermarket, then drops dead from the effort, leaving MacClaine a mountain of money. The pattern holds through her subsequent marriages.
Well, I suppose Mitchum doesn't start out poor. He starts out fabulously wealthy, a Howard Hughes figure, distant and stern. But he warms to MacClaine, sells off his business enterprises and retires to a little farm with her. He celebrates his retirement with a few hayseed neighbors, gets a little drunk, and tries to milk the bull instead of the cow. "Melrose! FORGIVE ME!", he howls before being kicked for a field goal. He leaves her millions.
In some ways the funniest and most satiric episode involves Newman as a Paris taxi driver who is an insane painter filled with contempt for bourgeois morality and greed. He lives in a shabby studio apartment in which a dozen large crane-like arms with paint brushes on the ends are activated by his "sonic palette." Newman bangs drums, operates jack hammers, and makes other random noises and the brushes slap away randomly at a large canvas. The painting are worth nothing. However, MacClaine accidentally activates the brushes by playing a record of Mendelssohn's "Spring Song." Newman has an epiphany while gawking at the brushes now oscillating in harmony. He now begins to produce machine-processed painting by playing classical music and jazz. They're no longer "his" work, although he runs around in a frenzy with a conductor's baton. The value of his paintings soars. They soar even more after the machines conspire to beat him to death. I can only think of one other movie, "The Prize", in which Newman has been in the least funny, fine dramatic actor that he is. He throws himself into the role of mad artist with amazing gusto.
I guess I won't go on with this because, as must be evident, the plot has a lot of characters and is a mosaic of sub-plots. Let me add that, in some prints, in a scene in which MacClaine and Mitchum enter a ballroom in evening clothes, she does a pirouette and drops to her knees, at which point her bodice slips a little, but just enough. I only add that for the pre-verts among us. There was no joy in it for me. I've never had an impure thought.