...und ledige Mädchen

Like it's literary namesake, this film is a campy relic from the dawn of the sexual revolution. However unlike the aforementioned book, this film is a whole lot of fun! Natalie Wood manages to hit her stride, squeezing the maximum humor from a deadpan delivery. Tony Curtis is smarmy, smug and loving it. Henry Fonda is having a ball, and Lauren Becall is the undisputed queen of droll comedy.

These performances are the highlights of a sophisticated romp, early 60's LA style. Mel Fererr's martini dance should be an inspiration to lounge swingers everywhere. From the cartoon credits, to the Sexy Sox showroom, to the hilarious freeway chase scene, it's all winking nodding blur of couches, crewcuts and cocktails. Great fun viewing for single girls and guys.

It is the revolutionary decade of the 1960's, and you are a successful career girl, a devoted young sex therapist (aka Helen Gurley Brown). The intriguing conundrum being "Does she or doesn't she" You have been ravaged by a salacious tabloid which thrives on malignancy!! It boils down to a choice between a sleazy columnist concealing himself as a married man, (Tony Curtis) or a confidant who is merely seeking a stilted arrangement, (Mel Ferrar) Your clothes are from Bonwit Teller which insinuates that you are masquerading a pretense of sophistication and elusive composure!! Such a wardrobe suggests a disconcerting demeanor about "Being Above Reproach" So!! as a result, sex with whom you think is a married man, (Tony Curtis) is just not in your cosmopolitan repertoire..but then again, he does that "Thing with the Ear"...We are not talking about putting his mouth over it like a pet terrier or a grandparent or something, we are talking about a "penetrating slither"... Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda's marital problems are what instigate the plot in this movie!! Tony Curtis pretends to be Frank Broderick,(Henry Fonda's character) with ulterior motives to unearth a gossip ridden story about a prominent therapist's (Natalie Wood) virginity status!! An oversexed male who delves into the recreation of sexual depravity is callous in his rudimentary pursuit of "basic needs". These urges are best paralleled with feeding time at the zoo!! While you are at the zoo, you might want to check up on how this evolutionary ladder thing is progressing!! Cleverly receiving an invitation to her apartment, she (Natalie Wood) thinks this for purposes of acting as a therapist and assuming a surrogate role, anything to help, right? How foolish!! Tony Curtis winds up wearing an upper middle class woman's bathrobe (fondly reminiscing about the days of "Some like it Hot") and now!! it is time to get down to business!! The bottom of the earlobe is everyone's nemesis, and not just a sexual deviate's!! Heavy breathing on your ear, especially after a couple of martinis, gives your professional resolve all the longevity of a Popsicle on a hot July afternoon!! Your befuddled verbosity which contains an onslaught of analytical euphemisms is a subterfuge for your maverick curiosity, and that pejorative confusion inevitably translates to your desire for "Sex"!! Everyone lights a cigarette while they have another cigarette going already!! This precarious mannerism purports a potpourri of falsehoods everybody seems comfortable with!! Lying about things has now become second nature to people, as a matter of fact, it is kind of fun!! This allegedly married man you are cavorting with has a good head on his shoulders, but he is not thinking with his head...What he is thinking with is not very swift at all!! BELIEVE ME!! Such a lewd fiasco comprises the aggregate compendium of you as the prototype for woman's liberation in the 1960's!! Finally, recrimination has evoked a bittersweet awakening to you!! It is now become very obvious to you that first hand consequences are dreadfully different from that article you read in Reader's Digest" on "THE DON JUAN COMPLEX" To top it all off, you fall in love!! Natalie Wood is sensational in this role...Originally known as the adorable little girl on "Miracle on 34th St" not much has changed since then!! She may still believe in Santa Claus because he is the only man who keeps his promises!!

The movie "Sex and the Single Girl" has an amazing array of talent, Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrar, and a whole list of others!! It depicts a scenario that the sexual revolution comes in blue and pink, and it is here to stay for good and keeps, it is just a matter of how effective and ubiquitous it will be on the various individuals involved!! Body parts like knees and ear lobes are vulnerabilities for the consummate carnal's double-entendre!! This film amusingly resonates itself to a common sixties style movie, and winds up having a matchmaker's version of a happy ending!! Most significantly, everybody has flippantly and metaphorically acknowledged that Eve ate the apple. the Greeks were indeed, perverted, and a person by the name of Sigmund Freud did actually exist!! Funny movie!!! Why? It is a comically realistic illustration of men's over active hormones that are incorporated into a screwball comedy!!...I liked this movie!!

What could have been a sharp satire on 60's sexual attitudes runs basically lame throughout, the script simply comes up short. The basic mistaken identity plot device fails to provide laughs and it is so much the base of the film's story that it's failure prevents the whole from going anywhere.

However, all is not lost. There is a saving grace, and that is the presence of the then 25 year old Natalie Wood, playing the sexologist Helen Gurley Brown.

Wood, in this film is staggeringly pretty. She had, at that age, a natural girl next door beauty that has rarely if ever been rivaled in film history. Seeing this film and Wood again recently for the first time in decades was a revelation. About her, not the mediocre film.

I actually find this scatterbrained 1964 comedy a surprisingly amusing screwball farce all these years later despite its titillating title. So apparently does director Peyton Reed since he based most of his 2004 comic pastiche, "Down with Love", on the storyline of this movie and less so on any of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romps of the same era. Regardless, they all have the same brew of conjugal misunderstandings, mistaken identities and leering though never explicit sexuality because those were the days when a woman's virtue would never be compromised for anyone but the right man. Directed by the heavy-handed Richard Quine ("Paris When It Sizzles") and written by Joseph Heller (later the author of "Catch-22") and David R. Schwartz, this ridiculous comedy benefits from a game cast headed by Tony Curtis still riding high from "Some Like It Hot" (which is referred to for easy laughs in the story) and Natalie Wood who shows her comedy chops with dexterity here.

Curtis plays Bob Weston, a sleazy magazine writer for a men's magazine whose editors are intent on exposing Dr. Helen Gurley Brown as a fraud as a sex expert. Author of the best-selling "Sex and the Single Girl", Brown is not at all the clench-jawed celebrity author who wrote the real book and appeared on "The Tonight Show" constantly. Instead, she is a gorgeous, intellectually prodigious 23-year-old who extols female empowerment in the bedroom. Showing off his moral depravity, Weston steals the marital woes of her next-door neighbors, pantyhose magnate Frank Broderick and his acerbic wife Sylvia, and comes to see Dr. Brown as a patient. The rest is predictable but still a good amount of fun. Curtis was still at the top of his game here showing how he can easily elicit laughs from such a vile manipulator, but it's Wood who surprises as Brown. Displaying a nervous but infectious energy that feeds nicely into the two sides of the doctor, she is funny and sexy in a way that she could never quite balance as well again in her career. Witness the hilariously conflicted drunken scene in her apartment for evidence of her talent.

Quine was smart to cast three sharp stars in the key supporting roles - Henry Fonda as the put-upon Frank browbeaten into a sad man by Lauren Bacall pulling all the stops as the shrewish basket case Sylvia is, and Mel Ferrer as Brown's somewhat ambiguous colleague. Add a sultry Fran Jeffries who performs two numbers (including the title tune) for no apparent reason except to sell records, an even sexier Leslie Parrish ("The Manchurian Candidate") as Weston's secretary, and a genuinely funny extended car chase scene, and you have the makings of an under-appreciated sex comedy. The 2009 DVD, part of the six-disc "The Natalie Wood Collection", includes a Warner Brothers cartoon ("Nelly's Folly") and the original theatrical trailer.

"Mention sex, and the single girl is cool and shy She objects to discussing sex with any guy You can bet she's as interested as he If sex weren't 50-50, where would everybody be?"

I love me a sex comedy from 1964 that openly acknowledges female desire, sex outside of marriage, erogenous zones, and male impotence. "I'm gaining confidence," says Tony Curtis in one scene, clearly alluding to an erection. Meanwhile Natalie Wood is, well, Natalie Wood, just as gorgeous and magnetic as ever, even if it's in a silly film like this. This cast, my god ... Wood, Curtis, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Mel Ferrer (loved his little dancing), Edward Everett Horton (age 78!), Otto Kruger (his last film) ... with music from Count Basie and the sultry Fran Jeffries - it's fun to see them all here, and they all get at least a moment or two to shine.

The film tries to do a little too much, adding on the zaniness of an extended chase scene at the end which got a little exhausting. I liked the quieter things early on, like the running gag of coin-operated machines (the water cooler, the bathroom sink, the mirror, etc) which are all cleverly slipped in, and maybe suggest a changing world, one which goes along with women acknowledging their physical desires. There are also several humorous references to Jack Lemmon in "Some Like it Hot" when Tony Curtis finds himself in a women's robe, even though of course Curtis himself was in the same film. And then we have the scenes with Wood staring into Curtis's eyes and becoming aroused by his ear kissing, or her prancing out to answer the phone in a low-cut dress saying "And I shall insist on the right to have as many love affairs as I please. I'm certainly not going to sacrifice one iota of my freedom or dignity for any man." My goodness, she's a joy to watch.

Where the film falters, however, is in its treatment of women in the workplace - there's a secretary who is clearly a sexual plaything of her boss, and the main character melts as soon as she meets her new patient, abandoning any kind of professionalism. The story is kicked off when tabloid magazine writers all wonder if this young psychologist is a virgin, and her colleagues wonder the same thing. That's kind of ironic, because Helen Gurley Brown's book is about acknowledging and even using sexuality for one's benefit in a savvy way - a controversial concept for a feminist to be sure - but Wood's character doesn't show signs of this, and if anything, she's pretty naïve. It kind of erodes the equality aspect of the film. Women are as sexual as men, it says, but they either want to be dominated (as Jeffries' character prefers at the end) or they don't mind sacrificing their careers to get married (as Wood and Bacall's characters do).

Hey, the film is just a playful little comedy and in 1964 I guess you could look at it as a stepping stone of feminism, just as Brown's book was, despite its mix of progressive and regressive content - but these overtones and the lengthy car chase prevented me from rating it higher. Worth watching though.