Not with My Wife, You Don’t! (1966)
(On Cable TV, October 2022) The makers of Not with My Wife, You Don’t! clearly intended to make a comedy. Some of this intent makes it to the finish line. After all, it’s hard to miss completely when you’ve got a semi-manic Tony Curtis butting heads with George C. Scott over who’s going to seduce the lovely Virna Lisi. The film’s initially jumbled chronology goes to the Korean War to give us a look at the first such conflict (won by Curtis’ protagonist) before skipping to the mid-1960s where Scott’s character comes back from the dead to create an adulterous triangle. (The film doesn’t quite have the romantic antagonist sleep with the wife, but that’s merely some lingering Production Code reflexes—the suggestion of an affair is very explicit.) The best part of the film is seeing Curtis go through the ordeal as a meticulous planning officer (one who knows everything and can get anything) seeing his wife walk away and getting embroiled in various complications. There are some good moments here: a pleasant mid-1960s pop-optimism, a refreshingly silly military farce (complete with rather good colour footage of mid-1960s Air Force planes—including one air show shot that had me gasping) and Curtis is in fine form in a role ideally suited for his persona. Writer-director Norman Panama is inordinately fond of fake-outs (most notably at the beginning and the end of the film). Alas, this comes with a few warnings: Far too long at nearly two hours, Not with My Wife, You Don’t! sometimes gets bogged down, suffers from baffling misogyny, and a plot that doesn’t without amazingly bone-headed choices. There are also some substantial pacing issues here—a far-too-long prologue that can’t figure out it’s not the main plot, an overdrawn arctic-posting sequence, a far-too-long aerial race from London to Italy that squeezes the comic lemon dry, and a few drawn-out scenes belabouring the same point. As a result, the film often appears mystifying: it’s funny but not as funny as it thinks it is, and some judicious editing at the script stage would have helped. Still, it’s hard to be all that disappointed at a movie that has been almost forgotten today and pops up as a bit of a hidden gem. Not that expensive of a gem, but still a production with decent actors, big-budget means and nice moments here and there. Approach Not with My Wife, You Don’t! with the right expectations (as in—don’t expect it to be a classic comedy) and it just may surprise you. But it could have been better.