Catherine Deneuve's first Hollywood movie sees her miscast as the wife of an executive (Peter Lawford) who has an affair with an unhappily married man (Jack Lemmon). Apparently Shirley Maclaine was originally considered for Deneuve's role and they really should have gone with her - or another more expressive actress. Her beauty and aristocratic manner can work well on film but not here when the role requires some life.
The longer this movie went on the more it annoyed me. Cinema screens and theatres in the late 60s were full of these sort of middle-aged-men-wish-fulfillment stories about disaffected middle aged men who threw off their inhibitions and ran away from their nagging bitch wives to find happiness with hot dream girls. Lemmon's wife Sally Kellerman is a materialistic ball breaker (he doesn't seem to be responsible for any of the problems in the marriage), his male friends are lecherous and drunken but basically supportive (Jack Weston, Harvey Korman), the female roles are caricatures: blank dream girls (Deneuve), greedy bitches (Kellerman) or wacky hipsters (Myrna Loy).
It is fun to see Myrna Loy and Charles Boyer as free spirited old people, but even they can't transcend cliche. Lemmon and Deneuve have zero chemistry, their dilemmas have no stakes (he doesn't like his wife and job and she doesn't like her husband and neither have kids... so what's the issue?), the final rush to the airport takes something like over half an hour of on screen time (and involves "hilarious" drunk driving), there's too much talk about princes turning into frogs and vice versa plus endless scenes of people dancing at parties (this was a feature of some of Deneuve's French films around this time - maybe director Stuart Rosenberg was trying to make her feel at home).
On the sunny side, Lemmon is perfectly cast and never phones it in; there are some funny line; the support cast is impressive; and the music score very good, including the title track and "Say a Little Prayer".
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