Jose Ferrer directed and stars in this "comedy" about a man who on the day his wife tells him that after 9 years of marriage, she thinks she's expecting, goes to work and begins to believe he is about to be squeezed out of his job of 15 years as part of a large company taking over his firm.
Fans of 1960s TV series will see brief scenes with Mayberry's Otis the town drunk, Get Smart's Chief, Hogan's Heroes' Colonel Klink, Gilligan's Island's Mr. Howell, Dick Van Dyke's Mel Cooley, and the Beverly Hillbillies' Jane Hathaway.
Jose's character is Jim Fry and he spends almost the entire film believing he is about to lose his job. Just when he delivers a hand-written letter to the new company president, he learns that he was totally wrong, that instead they are promoting him. This isn't a spoiler because in scenes where Jim wasn't there, we viewers heard the company big wigs stating their promotion plans for him.
His wife Ginny's question of "Is she or isn't she?" was answered about halfway through the show. She was.
What I cannot figure is how this was billed as a comedy. I sort-of chuckled one time, when Ginny fooled her husband near the end by pretending that the important letter of resignation he wanted her to read was a totally different letter-suggesting that he picked up the wrong letter in the boss's office. She only fooled him for a couple of seconds.
We opened with an extra long silent scene where the couple arise to an alarm clock-separate beds of course-and go about totally routine tasks of bathing and cooking breakfast, each doing some things for the other and not until halfway through eating breakfast together do they say one word to each other.
Jim was disturbed as soon as he got to work because he did not receive an invitation to this big luncheon in a few days. This started him on the spiral to believing his days there were numbered, and a few attempts at lining up another job were not successful. For a good part of the first half of the movie, he was rather grumpy and quiet toward his wife, not wanting to tell her he wasn't invited to the luncheon. Finally he told her and they confronted the situation in a rather realistic manner.
Other things happened at work that caused Jim even more worry, and so we mostly dealt with a man who right at a time when he needed more money than before, appeared to be headed for the unemployment office. I suppose I could have found some humor in this predicament-somehow-but the writers of this film did not give me a single thing to laugh at.
As a comedy it was a dismal failure. As a drama, it was also a total failure because we mostly saw a man fearful of losing his job when we knew full well he had nothing to worry about. Frankly, the only way I made it through this whole mess was to see what other old TV regulars were going to appear. I believe the most fitting score is a 2. I have seen other reviewers here giving it much higher scores. If you get some laughs out of this-more power to you.
Fans of 1960s TV series will see brief scenes with Mayberry's Otis the town drunk, Get Smart's Chief, Hogan's Heroes' Colonel Klink, Gilligan's Island's Mr. Howell, Dick Van Dyke's Mel Cooley, and the Beverly Hillbillies' Jane Hathaway.
Jose's character is Jim Fry and he spends almost the entire film believing he is about to lose his job. Just when he delivers a hand-written letter to the new company president, he learns that he was totally wrong, that instead they are promoting him. This isn't a spoiler because in scenes where Jim wasn't there, we viewers heard the company big wigs stating their promotion plans for him.
His wife Ginny's question of "Is she or isn't she?" was answered about halfway through the show. She was.
What I cannot figure is how this was billed as a comedy. I sort-of chuckled one time, when Ginny fooled her husband near the end by pretending that the important letter of resignation he wanted her to read was a totally different letter-suggesting that he picked up the wrong letter in the boss's office. She only fooled him for a couple of seconds.
We opened with an extra long silent scene where the couple arise to an alarm clock-separate beds of course-and go about totally routine tasks of bathing and cooking breakfast, each doing some things for the other and not until halfway through eating breakfast together do they say one word to each other.
Jim was disturbed as soon as he got to work because he did not receive an invitation to this big luncheon in a few days. This started him on the spiral to believing his days there were numbered, and a few attempts at lining up another job were not successful. For a good part of the first half of the movie, he was rather grumpy and quiet toward his wife, not wanting to tell her he wasn't invited to the luncheon. Finally he told her and they confronted the situation in a rather realistic manner.
Other things happened at work that caused Jim even more worry, and so we mostly dealt with a man who right at a time when he needed more money than before, appeared to be headed for the unemployment office. I suppose I could have found some humor in this predicament-somehow-but the writers of this film did not give me a single thing to laugh at.
As a comedy it was a dismal failure. As a drama, it was also a total failure because we mostly saw a man fearful of losing his job when we knew full well he had nothing to worry about. Frankly, the only way I made it through this whole mess was to see what other old TV regulars were going to appear. I believe the most fitting score is a 2. I have seen other reviewers here giving it much higher scores. If you get some laughs out of this-more power to you.