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An entertaining blast of stale air. There’s one for the front of the DVD!
Look, sex farces are harder to successfully complete than they may appear. Rock Hudson and Doris Day made it appear effortless and charming together (and separately) in films like Pillow Talk, but there’s real hard work underneath that shiny artifice. Cary Grant, the penultimate performer in romantic comedies, could play any of the male parts in this film with his eyes closed and backwards at any point in his career, but that would belie the tremendous craft and care that went into making it all work.
Sex and the Single Girl has a few gripping moments of breeziness and wit, mostly found in the criminally underutilized Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, and Mel Ferrer, but flounders a bit when left in Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood’s hands. Curtis has the right kind of wise guy charm for this material, but Wood was much better in tortured roles that put her doe-eyed beauty on its head.
The story, which only borrows the title from Helen Gurley Brown’s book, concerns a tabloid writer trying to do an expose on a young psychologist’s institute concerning martial and sexual problems. He borrows the identity of his happily married buddy (Fonda), and ends up pulling apart and bringing together not only his relationship with Wood, but Fonda’s with his wife (Bacall). As far as sexual farce and romantic comedy premises go, there’s a meal to be made of it, and one wonders what Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond could spin out from it.
The problem is simply this, Wood and Curtis have a passable chemistry, but they don’t get too many legitimate laughs to play out. Fonda, Bacall, and Ferrer get the wackier, hornier characters, and the majority of the good jokes. Then there’s other supporting players orbiting about that don’t bring much to the narrative, like Fran Jeffries, who was brought in primarily to provide numerous musical distractions that pad the running time more than they thrill.
There’s still plenty charming about Sex and the Single Girl, but a better director could have found the rhythms and edited more judiciously. The climatic chase to the airport just keeps going and going and going, past the point of being funny and into the point of needing a good trimming. This is a slightly dated, middle-of-the-pack affair from a decade that spawned some truly daring and memorably sexy romantic comedies. There’s nothing wrong to the point of negativity with Sex and the Single Girl, it’s just a mid-shelf entry in everyone’s body of work.
