Essa Coisa, o Amor

Back in 1967 when Luv came out in theaters I went to see it and it is one of the very few times I just could not get into the film and walked out before it was over. 45 years later I watched it and did sit through it finally seeing how it ended and my opinion was raised slightly, but not enough to raise it to make it a classic. It's not one of Jack Lemmon's better films.

But it certainly is one of the weirdest I've seen, not funny but just plain weird. Lemmon plays an ultimate neurotic in this one who we meet as he is trying to jump off the Manhattan Bridge. Back in 1967 the walkway was still open for foot traffic. Just as he's about to take a swan dive into the East River along comes an old college friend Peter Falk who is a junk dealer and prowls the streets at night looking for items that thoughtless people might have thrown away.

Falk is unhappily married himself to a neurotic played by Elaine May who won't divorce him. What to do, but put these two neurotics together and see what happens. He saves Lemmon and takes him home and let's nature take its course. In the meantime Falk can pursue the fitness instructor of his dreams Nina Wayne.

Luv was a big hit on Broadway running 901 performances for three years and starred Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson in the Lemmon, Falk, and May roles. On stage it is only a three character play and maybe they should have paid author Murray Schisgal to expand the play for the screen which Columbia Pictures didn't. It must have got a lot of laughs on stage to have had a three year run. But my laughs were few and far between.

Way before Woody Allen laid claim to the same people and the same territory, this 1967 film based on a 1964 play by Murray Schisgal, directed on Broadway by the young Mike Nichols (who had been Elaine May's partner in Chicago) may be the first Hollywood film ever to feature a group of highly neurotic, overly articulate, and –-although never named as such —apparently middle-class Jewish urban characters. Unfortunately, as funny and satirical as the film is at times, opening it up to the real world with naturalistic settings did not help support its weak story structure. When push comes to shove, the movie is no more than a series of sketches, the sort that Nichols & May did so brilliantly on records and stage. Irishman Jack Lemmon seems miscast; he does his best, however, to sustain the frenetic shtick, mugging outrageously at times. On the plus side, the brilliant and then beautiful Elaine May (future director and writer of many a film flop) may be the greatest crazy Jewish American Princess ever portrayed on film. Try as she might, Woody Allen's second wife, Louise Lasser, understudy in the original Broadway production, could never quite match Elaine May when it came to sheer J. A. P. nuttiness.

I noticed that many reviewers loved "Luv" and many were left cold by it. Place me in the latter group. It's a shame, as the film had several ingredients that SHOULD have made for an excellent film...such as it starring Jack Lemmon, Eileen May and Peter Falk. Yet despite this, it just left me frustrated and wondering how the story could be this dull and unappealing.

The story is in many ways surreal and strange. It begins with Harry (Lemmon) on a bridge...about to jump to his death. However, an old friend (Falk) sees him and instead of getting hysterical, the friend brings him home and introduces him to his wife (May). Why introduce him to the wife? Well, the husband has a mistress he wants to marry....and he wants to set up his wife with a new husband! Unfortunately, ultimately, these new arrangements don't work out at all...and the original husband and wife wish they hadn't divorced in the first place.

The dialog is strange...but not funny strange...just strange. The characters also act oddly...but again...not in a funny way. The story is just odd but in an unsatisfying way....and also, sadly, among the worst performances by Jack Lemmon, an otherwise brilliant actor.

Disasterous film version of the Murray Schisgal Broadway hit from the word go. Too dark and moody of an approach by director Donner and an obvious distaste in the material from leads Lemmon, Falk and May, who do their best, but in the end it comes down to the fact that they are badly miscast. Luv became one of those Hollywood oddities - the picture that gets produced despite the fact that everyone agrees it is certain to bomb. It did.

I have to say the same thing about this film that I said about "The Happening" (from the same year, coincidentally), and that's that you almost have to hate it BITTERLY not to like it A LITTLE. I agree about a lot of the slapstick being out of place (though not even all of THAT). I think there's at least one good thing about Harry's "fits" (his hysterical blindness and deafness and so on) and that's seeing Peter Falk react to them in his usual low-key way. Maybe "Harry" WASN'T the best part for Jack Lemmon, I don't know, but Falk and Elaine May really made the most of their roles. And even Nina Wayne (the sister of Carol Wayne, I imagine), who had a much smaller part, makes the most of her comical "dumb blonde" role, without genuinely copying her sister. And of course, it has several great character actors - Eddie Mayehoff, Severn Darden (in a nearly silent role) and Paul Hartman (in a completely silent one). One of the best scenes has Harry reciting "Star Light, Star Bright" in an aggravated Jack Lemmon voice (which clashes with the poem completely, of course), and it's also the scene where Ellen wishes on the star by saying, "I wish I were a lesbian, that's what I wish. Then I wouldn't have these demeaning problems." Harry : You'd have other problems. Like picking up girls. Ellen : That's easy. You just have to be a liar and a hypocrite. Harry : It's not as easy as that. Do you know what a haircut costs these days? Again, on the one hand, I find the complaints about LUV hard to disagree with, and on the other hand, I find the movie impossible not to like a whole lot.