Bash Brannigan Lives!

Tomorrow morning, Turner Classic Movies is running How To Murder Your Wife. Here's a message I posted when Showtime ran it ten years ago…

Showtime is running How To Murder Your Wife, a 1965 movie that Jack Lemmon, it is rumored, very much regretted making. It's kind of an interesting film because it has a good, fun feeling and a lot of great performances. Terry-Thomas is quite splendid as Lemmon's "Man" (i.e., butler-valet) and Eddie Mayehoff, a very underappreciated comic actor, walks off with every scene he's in. Lemmon twinkles, Virna Lisi is stunning, the music is great…and somehow, the whole thing falls apart from a stupid story with a stupider resolution.

Lemmon plays a comic strip artist who's a confirmed bachelor. His art imitates his life and vice-versa so when he accidentally gets married to Lisi, his comic strip character (Bash Brannigan) gets married in the strip. Both creator and creation undergo changes, not necessarily for the better, and the cartoonist finally decides to murder the wife in the comic strip…only this gets confused with murdering his real wife. When the real wife runs away, Lemmon is charged with her murder…and in order to make that part of the story happen, screenwriter George Axelrod and director Richard Quine have to just ignore how the actual judicial system works. For example, it is somehow decided that Lemmon can be charged with First Degree Murder even though there is no physical proof that anyone has been killed, thereby suspending habeas corpus years before anyone had ever heard of Alberto Gonzales.

Lemmon goes to trial — and I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending in the next paragraph because it's so lame, so consider this your SPOILER ALERT…

Lemmon goes to trial and decides that his only chance of not being sent to the electric chair is to (a) confess to a murder that never happened and (b) convince a conveniently all-male jury, in a five minute speech, that murdering your wife is a good thing. I was thirteen years old when I saw this movie and even I was sitting there going, "Come…on!" Easily one of the silliest scenes ever to appear on the screen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The whole film, if you think about it with the slightest bit of logic, is quite ridiculous and it's a testimony to Mr. Lemmon's charm (and Mayehoff and Thomas) that it's still almost worth watching…once.

Cartoonists love it, not for the plot but for the absurd life style of one of their own, and the occasional shots of comic strips and of "Lemmon's" hand drawing them. Obviously, a real artist had to be engaged to do this and when Mr. Lemmon was signed, he told the producers that as a kid, his favorite comic book was a strip called The Sub-Mariner and he wondered if they could get that feature's artist. They tracked down Bill Everett but he was then coping with too many alcohol-related health problems and he reluctantly declined the job.

Instead, they hired the great Alex Toth and his first assignment, which he did, was to whip up several newspaper-style strips that ran in the Hollywood trade papers to announce various signings and the upcoming commencement of filming. Toth was also supposed to "stunt double" Lemmon's drawing hand for some shots in the film until someone noticed a teensy problem: Lemmon was right-handed and Toth was a lefty. Alex also began arguing with the producers over something-or-other (Alex was always arguing over something-or-other) and he walked off the project. His replacement was Mel Keefer, who did all the artwork in the film and played Jack Lemmon's drawing hand.