Cute, pallie. Sony's Choice Collection vault of hard-to-find library and cult titles has released How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life, the 1968 sex comedy starring Dean Martin, Stella Stevens, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson that isn't all that "hard-to-find"...because Sony already released it back in '06 as part of The Dean Martin Double Feature disc (along with Who Was That Lady?). Anyone owning that disc won't need to double-dip here; it looks to be the same transfer, and there are no extras, new or otherwise. A silly, dated, but well-tempoed battle of the sexes farce, How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life still generates laughs with its often amusing script and its superlative cast. Looks terrific in this anamorphically-enhanced widescreen release.

New York City salesgirl Carol Corman (Stella Stevens) would like to get ahead at swank Hunter Department Store...but not if it means accepting a promotion in exchange for a drinks at lecherous boss Everett Bauer's (Alan Oppenheimer) apartment. Carol's friend, Marcia (Shelley Morrison) points out that owner Harry Hunter (Eli Wallach) is the kind of gentleman who would never treat a woman the way Bauer does, but when Carol has to deliver a package after hours, who should answer the door of Miss Muriel Laszlo's (Anne Jackson) apartment than the very married Harry Hunter. The next day, Hunter offers to buy off Carol with a promotion, but Carol has too much integrity for that...until she hears slimy Bauer recommending another girl to Hunter for the position--which Carol takes to stick it to Bauer. Unfortunately, that makes everyone think Carol is Hunter's mistress, including Hunter's investment banker friend, David Sloane (Dean Martin). When Sloane confirms with Hunter that he indeed is having an affair, Sloane proposes seducing the mistress to save Hunter's marriage to harpy Mary Hunter (Katharine Bard). Of course, Sloane is already on the wrong track with the wrong girl, and soon he's involved with marriage-hungry good girl Carol, who agrees to be kept by him...provided there's a wedding ring in the bargain.

I hadn't seen How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life for years and years, having forgotten most of it (who could forget Stella?), and quite frankly, I wasn't expecting much this time around, considering how many of these 60s Dino sex comedies seem to just melt together in my memory--they even sound the same: Who Was That Lady?, All in a Night's Work, Who's Got the Action?, Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?, and of course the Matt Helm spy movies. However, I had a good time watching How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life. It's a little classier, a little wittier than many of those relatively innocent-but-still-leering sex comedies from that time period, due no doubt to the better-than-average cast and crew.

Similar to the earlier Doris Day-type "clean" naughty little confections, How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life's January, 1968 release might tempt one to quickly dismiss it as a title released just past its sell-by date. After all, the year before two romantic comedy dramas, The Graduate and Two for the Road, pretty much pushed the genre way past the then-accepted Hollywood conventions of the genre (it's with no little bit of irony that Day was offered the part of The Graduate's Mrs. Robinson, only to turn it down for fear of offending her loyal fans). So seen within in that historical timeline, How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life pseudo-contemporary concerns amid all the "marriage is torture" jokes, pale in comparison.

Closer inspection of How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life, though, reveals it's nothing more than a thin reworking of basic Restoration comedy elements, and those never go out of style. Mistaken identities, frustrated, weak husbands, dissatisfied wives, angry lovers pushed to plot and scheme, horn-dog bachelors (who will surely get hitched and de-balled), various blocked assignations amid much frenzied back-and-forth door slamming, until wedding bells sound and all is happily, synthetically made right. Everyone is a type, who then acts against type, as the farcical machinery ratchets up the comedic, sexual tension: Dino the womanizer gets the guilts when he could plow away at Stella, then bursts into a homicidal rage every time he believes she--the girl he thinks he doesn't want--has cheated on him. Powerful store owner Wallach is afraid of his wife and infatuated with his screwy mistress, and Stella is the career girl with too much integrity to take a promotion to keep quiet, but not enough integrity to immediately decline Dino's offer of co-habitation, regardless of the promise of marriage at the end of it. To criticize How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life based on today's sociological and gender understandings is first, kind of silly, and second, beside the point: that's missing the forest for the trendy trees. All How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life has to do is honor its Restoration comedy/farce traditions and make us laugh...which it does quite nicely, thanks to Fielder Cook's (Patterns, A Big Hand for the Little Lady, TV's The Homecoming - A Christmas Story) sprightly direction and producer Stanley Shapiro's and Nate Monaster's frequently funny script (Shaprio practically invented the 60s sex comedy with scripts for Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, That Touch of Mink, along with Monaster, and Come September, among many others) .

The cast is equally talented. Familiar and most welcome faces pop up for punchy little supporting turns, including shiny-pated Alan Oppenheimer as a handsy boss, Betty Field as a pissed-off, wronged woman, the marvelous George Furth as a slide-rule Romeo courting Stella ("We'll have 2.7 kids!"), and one of my all-time favorites, terrified Woodrow Parfrey, convinced his hated mother-in-law has returned from the grave (the movie's best sight gag). I'm not sure what Jack Albertson and Shelley Morrison are doing here, but I'll bet most of their stuff was left on the cutting room floor. As for our four leads, they're effortlessly funny. Eli Wallach gets a chance to be crazy funny (his manic frustration is beautifully controlled, physically and verbally), and his energy is infectious (a completely different approach to getting laughs in comparison with his upcoming comedic gem in Leone's The Good, the Bad, & The Ugly). His real-life wife, the equally talented Anne Jackson, doesn't have much to do with her odd character (she loves old dead movie stars, it's pointed out...before that's dropped with a thud), but she's still funny doing it (that two shot of her and Fields, talking to Dino, is memorably bizarre). As for Dino, well...he's Dino. He seems a little bit more on his game here, a little more engaged (he's such a pro at being laid back and charming, who can tell?), but some of those close-ups are brutal (hard to believe he's only 50 here). And Stella, well...what can I write about Stella Stevens that other infatuated movie fans haven't already written? Smolderingly sexy with a body built exclusively for Playboy® and capable of being hilariously funny, Stevens was, along with Tuesday Weld, one of the most criminally underutilized actresses in '60s Hollywood. As charming and erotic as she is here in How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life...it's just too bad she kept appearing in movies like How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life.

The DVD:

The Video:
Legendary cinematographer Lee Garmes (Morocco, Shanghai Express, Jungle Book, Scarface, Duel in the Sun, Land of the Pharaohs), in his penultimate assignment, gives How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life a molded, sculptured look that's really unlike most of the flatly-lit, crudely-colored sex comedies from the studios at this time. And that visual schematic looks terrific here in a mostly-perfect anamorphicall-enhanced, 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, with zero blemishes and no compression issues (a few times, the print went a little dark, a little grainy―but not for long). Fantastic.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English mono audio track doesn't exactly do justice to that insanely catchy title tune, The Winds of Change, from Michel Legrand, Mack David and The Ray Conniff Singers, but it's serviceable, with little hiss and fluctuation. No subtitles or closed-captions available.

The Extras:
No extras for How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life.

Final Thoughts:
A bit choppy at times, but most of the classical farce elements are in place. The script is pretty witty for this kind of nonsense, the direction is on-tack, and the cast is first-rate. Funny. I'm recommending How to Save a Marriage -- And Ruin Your Life.