Strange Bedfellows (1965)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) As I may have mentioned before, there’s a specific tone to 1960s sex comedies that hasn’t, can’t and won’t be successfully replicated. A mixture of naughtiness but no explicitness, mid-period Technicolor cinematography, slightly more permissive audience expectations, stars moulded in the waning studio system and the optimistic exhilaration of the decade as everything was changing. Strange Bedfellows may not be a classic, but it is an illustration of that specific subgenre and the fun it can have. Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida star — Lollobrigida is a good fit for the part of a flighty artist who gets married to Hudson’s suave account executive. Hudson himself is not bad, although the more I see of his performances, the more I can’t help but compare them to what Cary Grant would have done better — both, after all, looked the part of handsome leading men, but Grant had a self-deprecating streak that made his comic performances almost perfect. Hudson doesn’t quite have that, so while his performance is enjoyable, it doesn’t quite have that extra spark necessary for this kind of comedy. (To face the obvious question whenever we have a Hudson romantic comedy: Strange Bedfellows does have a surprising number of very ironic moments knowing that Hudson was gay — clearly the filmmakers knew what they were doing.)  There’s some jet-setting charm to the way the film goes from London to New York. The tone of the film shifts a bit too much toward absurdity in its last act — not that I don’t like zany humour, but it could have been zanier from the start. There are better 1960s comedies out there, but even an imperfect vehicle, such as Strange Bedfellows, is worth a few chuckles. If you like that style, you’ll like the film.