How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life (1968)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) At this point, I’m pretty much committed to eventually seeing all Dean Martin films – despite his late-career laziness in picking unchallenging projects, a little Martin charm goes a looong way. In How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life, he clearly gets a role at the measure of his public Vegas show persona as a boozy womanizing bachelor – the kind of thing he could play without making much of an effort, but with remarkably good return on his effort. The film uses his character as a launching pad for further complications, as he sets out to save his married buddy from an affair by seducing the girl before his buddy does… but mistakenly romancing the wrong girl. As with many late-1960s films, there’s clearly a malaise here about the way American society was changing, and the role left to old-school males like Martin. Unlike other better-remembered films of the era, however, How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life doesn’t quite know what to do about it except playing up the absurdity of mistresses asking for a pension plan. Some better-than-average dialogue makes this characteristically chaste 1960s sex comedy go down easy – even if Martin looks too old and dishevelled to be perfectly credible as a romantic lead, his suaveness dominates the screen and makes the entire thing feel better than if another actor had been in it. A good measure of star power, even if the film itself isn’t particularly memorable nor striking.