Everybody loves a good dirty fairy tale, as Billy Wilder proved in his romantic triumph The Apartment. Stanley Shapiro works hard but hasn't a chance because his basic premise is flawed: Adultery is fine if the man is rich and clever enough to juggle both his wife and his lover. The coincidences and mistaken identities necessary to keep the premise afloat become tiring, even though the bit about Stella Stevens moving the burial plot of a complete stranger has a hilarious result ... the deceased woman's husband is convinced that his wife has come back from the dead!

How to Save a Marriage (And Ruin Your Life) connects with the audience only when poor Carol is dealing with real working girl problems. Middle manager Bauer (Alan Oppenheimer) offers Carol a job recommendation in exchange for a hot date -- a situation comparable to The Apartment. When Carol finds out about Harry's philandering, Harry tries to pay her off with a promotion to ensure her silence. She's too honest to accept on those terms, but takes the promotion to frustrate Bauer, convincing David that she's Harry's mistress. The lies and deceptions prevent us from respecting any of the male characters. Harry is an unhappy hypocrite and Dean Martin's David is a meddling ass. Carol thinks his offer to set her up in an apartment is a prelude to marriage, so she quits her job.

Thus Carol joins a sisterhood of women who allow themselves to be kept only to be cast out when they get too old, like Betty Field's Thelma. But the labor union proposed by Thelma ("We need to be taken care of in our old age!") equates sexual comfort with social security. When Muriel holds up Harry for outrageous ex-mistress perks, it makes the kept women seem little different from prostitutes: Our greatest concern is that they may have to leave their fantasy apartment and rejoin the dismal real world. True love rescues all three women in a finish that offers no answers for the male crimes and female retaliations. The title song re-plays over a merry-go-round that suggests that things were always like this and will continue in the same way.

Oddly, writer Shapiro's vision never considers that the women could always blackmail their lovers. Cheap sex comedies stop being funny when they spoil the sexual fantasyland with hard realities.

The interesting actors don't quite make it all work. Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, another husband-wife acting team, are too good for the movie and play their parts as if the she show might add up to something important. Dean Martin is in his cool comedy mode, and only seems to be involved in his love scenes. For Stella Stevens this is just one more lost opportunity to break into top-rank stardom. She's sexy as all get-out, a quality that only gets in the way of our sympathy for her character: When Carol uses her charms to exact sneaky revenge on Dean Martin's character, she lowers herself to his level of dishonesty. For 1968, How to has a very old-fashioned double standard about sex. It wouldn't be funny if David did seduce Carol or Carol really had to make a choice about compromising herself, because then we'd have to take the basically dishonest situation seriously.

How to Save a Marriage (And Ruin Your Life) looks great and is crisply directed, and Stella Stevens is a pleasure to look at even if her role is not optimal. The enhanced transfer is near perfect and the audio unblemished. Both shows in the Dean Martin Double Feature are on one disc with no extras. The first movie overcomes its dated attitudes, and the second will provoke some good discussions of its own.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
Who Was That Lady? rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none

How to Save a Marriage (And Ruin Your Life) rates:
Movie: Good --
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none

Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: December 2, 2006