Boys' Night Out Reviews

These cosmopolitan, chic 1960s sex farces/bedroom comedies are much harder to realize then their artifice would lead you to believe. Just because Doris Day and Rock Hudson flirting in Pillow Talk is a tart, tasty dessert doesn’t mean the whole genre is so wonderfully pretty. Boys’ Night Out is entertaining, if a little long and possessing an underwhelming ending, and chaste sex comedy, the kind that would feel far older than its 1962 release date if it didn’t have that thin veneer of libido spread across it.

Funny that I brought up Pillow Talk as Boys’ Night Out shares a director with that film, Michael Gordon. Maybe it was that Doris Day and Rock Hudson knew how to play all of this with a wink and a nudge, or maybe that film just had a better script, but this is clearly trying to ape that formula (even borrowing Tony Randall for another horny, manic performance) and only mildly succeeding.

On a surface level, everything about Boys’ Night Out is perfect. The penthouse apartment is a prime example of mid-century modern aesthetics, Kim Novak’s wardrobe is smart and enviable, many of the supporting players are scene-stealers, and leading man James Garner is perfection. Garner’s performance here, in his familiar lovable rascal persona, launched him into stardom, and of the four major male characters he comes across the best.

Yet this was intended as a career re-launch for Kim Novak after a two year absence from the screen. Novak comes across well in the scenes that require her to flirt with Garner, or act like the brainy grad student her character really is. Where she stumbles is in projecting sexual availability and eagerness. She was never comfortable in playing the “sex symbol” role, and much of the plot hinges on this quality. Other than a few moments of her becoming visibly guarded, Novak is actually in perfectly fine form for most of the film. Finally getting to let her braininess and intelligence come to the surface gives the actress a new texture to explore in her familiar screen persona.

A tighter edit would have helped Boys’ Night Out as nearly two hours to tell this story inevitably leads to moments of feeling padded out. Or perhaps if the wives had larger parts, more fully realized characters to play than mere archetypes things would have improved. As it is, the film wants to play it both ways, to both underscore why the men want to step out on their wives while also reestablishing order and landing firmly on the side of “traditional” family values. Part of me also wishes that the film had ended with the chaotic confrontation in the apartment by the wronged wives, led a hilariously sauced Jessie Royce Landis as Garner’s hectoring mother (a role she played exceptionally in several films), and not the coda that does feature an amusing Zsa Zsa Gabor cameo but little else.

I would place Boys’ Night Out on roughly even playing ground with Sex and the Single Girl, another entertaining blast of stale air of 60s sex farce in sophisticated clothing. The whole thing is handsome looking, there’s plenty of entertainment to be found, and a ton of mileage out of watching glamorous, beautiful movie stars at play, but an aftertaste of “is that all there is?” Yes, that is all there is. Your threshold for this stuff may vary, but it’s a perfectly fine lazy Sunday afternoon movie.