Diary of a Bachelor

This obscurity (listed in very few books) showed up on Canada's Drive-In Classics channel and I taped it for its vintage, fully expecting a smirky bedroom farce with the usual sophomoric Hefner Era attitudes toward women. Pleasantly, it turns out that it's way closer in spirit to "Alfie" than Matt Helm, a lightweight and easy-going comedy about an aging New York playboy (William Traylor) and his search for genuine love.

In a funny reversal of the day's standards, the bouffanted Dior-clad beauties he dates (and not always beds) consistently have the upperhand, more often than not pulling the old "triple-f" on this suave and urbane swordsman-in-a-tux, finding him not good enough and discarding him. The title volume itself tells his story in flashback, and it's being read on the sly by his rich and elegant bride-to-be, and one wonders how much of her outrage is moral indignation, and how much is disappointment. His male poker buddies (including a young Dom Deluise) are losers at the romance game and hold him in awe, little knowing what a hopeless case he actually is. The finale, while not bitterly ironic, has a funny sense of the inevitable.

No "forgotten masterpiece", but a diverting little nugget that deserves an audience. Crisp and lovely B&W photography captures early 60s NYC, and the cars, decor and fashions are pure eye candy. Also, the acting and characterizations are quite solid, from a script by Freddie Francis.

Say you are Don Draper or one of the characters on Mad Men. It's 1964, and you have a couple of hours to kill. You see a movie marquee with "Diary of a Bachelor" on it. Kinda spicy sounding. Okay, I'm game. You go in, sit down, and in about half an hour, you realize how trite the whole thing is, and split.

But those of us not in 1964 may yet find this enjoyable, though not necessarily in the way its makers intended. The diary in question is surreptitiously read by the bride-to-be of Skip (William Traylor, handsome in a Bob Crane sort of way), who is tired of the bachelor life. We are then treated to a series of vignettes detailing the frustrations and disappointments of his dating career. It looks like someone saw a Neil Simon play, said "I can do this", and banged out a script without bothering to create individual personalities, so you get a lot of bland characterizations and people talking about "the Clarkson account" and such.

The director is apparently a veteran of TV, "The Howdy Doody Show" and others, and the whole project is brisk but cheesy in a way that someone used to working with a small budget might call "efficient". You will like the fashions, especially one woman named Angie who wears a zigzag cut top that makes her look like Charlie Brown's mom, and the swingin' music that blares out of the speakers like Billy May on a bender.

One more thing - I swore the guy who played Skip's pal Charlie was Richard Deacon with more hair. Was astonished to learn it was someone named Joe Silver. Never heard of him, but if you ever needed a Richard Deacon look-and-sound-alike, he was the guy to call.