The comedy of remarriage is really a creature of the 1930s but here it is alive and reasonably well in 1954 in Phffft, a screwbally kind of thing starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a married couple of eight years who decide wedlock isn’t for them, then try the alternatives only to eventually have a rethink about why they got divorced in the first place.
Eight years, not seven. Columbia had actually wanted to make a version of George Axelrod’s hit play The Seven Year Itch but the rights were tied up (it would become a Twentieth Century Fox film directed by Billy Wilder the following year) and so Axelrod sold them Phffft instead, an earlier play on pretty much the same subject.
The question is: did he sell them a pup? Lemmon and Holliday play Robert and Nina Tracey, he a lawyer, she a TV writer, who meet-cute in flashback, then decide to split in the present tense, leading to the pair of them re-entering the single life of dating etc. Mini-adventures for the born-again singletons ensue.
Both stretch their wings after divorcing, taking dancing lessons, pursing hobbies, having liaisons with new people. He meets a dim breathy blonde. She is chased by a TV actor and then Robert’s oldest friend, forever-bachelor Charlie. But their new lives don’t seem that exciting and the potential new love interests never get beyond the potential stage. It seems obvious that Nina really loves Robert and Robert really loves Nina, if only they’d both wake up and look reality square in the face rather than a fantasy version of marriage.
Not enough happens in Phffft to threaten the happy-ever-after outcome that it always seems to be heading for. The jeopardy problem to one side – it undermines the entire film, but hey ho – the rest of it is on castors. This was Lemmon’s second feature, and his previous one, It Should Happen to You, had also starred Holliday. None better than either of them at comic timing and the back and forth of quippy comic lines, which Axelrod’s script is full of. Director Mark Robson doesn’t do the players any favours by breaking up comic scenes with edits rather than letting the actors dictate the pace, but he’s good enough.
The side players are as good as the leads: Kim Novak doing a Marilyn Monroe number as Robert’s potential new love interest; Jack Carson as Robert’s hearty friend Charlie, who’ll eventually, with ten minutes’ running time left, be wheeled in as the biggest threat to the divorced couple’s eventual reunion. But Carson had at this point been playing the big fella who doesn’t get the girl for so long that no one watching could be in any doubt as to which way this was going, brilliant though Carson is in thankless roles like this.
In The Seven Year Itch faithful husband Tom Ewell is tempted by attractive neighbour Marilyn Monroe, and she is a temptation anyone can understand. Here there’s no real Monroe equivalent, and the side pursuits the couple get up to – rhumba dancing, painting, learning French – aren’t really milked for their full potential either, apart from one dance sequence in which both Robert and Nina start dancing with other partners and wind up with each other. Jim Carrey has seen this sequence and taken notes.
Phffft, incidentally is how celebrity gossip columnist Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror would announce recent break-ups and divorces among the rich and famous. And that, sadly, is more or less the assessment here. See The Seven Year Itch for what happens when it all goes right.
Phffft – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
