One Last Fling

The title seems slapped on. It doesn't have much to do with the frenetic acting and tired plot. Who's having the fling? Entrepreneur Zachary Scott or his wife, Alexis Smith, who wants to go back to work? Probably it refers to Scott, who has made overtures toward hiring a female military buddy for the job Smith wangles.

Smith is always a likable performer but has little to do here. And Scott, excellent as a villain or as an oily ladies' man in other movies, is just awful here. He may have had a flair for comedy but if so, he was very ill served by this director. He comes across as whiny and weak.

The plot is passable. It's painless. But it aims for screwball and falls far, far short.

In one of his few flings at light comedy Zachary Scott plays the macho husband of Alexis Smith and he believes woman's place is in the home. No wife of mine will earn any of the money while I'm master of the house. Make sure that dinner is on the table when I get home from the breadwinning.

But later on when he hires Veda Ann Borg at his job and Smith gets that mixed up which earns Scott a sock on the jaw from Douglas Kennedy her husband. After that poor Scott spends the film trying to reconcile.

Zachary Scott displays a flair for comedy that was not often seen. His typical role was set in his debut film where he's the serpentine and devious man Dimitrios Macropoulos in The Mask Of Dimitrios. Unfortunately One Last Fling was definitely one last fling at comedy for Zachary Scott and most lightweight material.

But Veda Ann Borg is here and she's worth watching in anything.

Olivia Pearce (Alexis Smith) is a stay-at-home wife in New York City and she's not happy about it. His husband Larry Pearce (Zachary Scott) is looking to hire an assistant. Due to a mistaken assumption, almost everybody concludes that he's hiring Olivia especially since she ran the music store while he was away during the war. In reality, he wanted to hire Gaye Winston, a WAC acquaintance from the war. It all leads to incrimination and the threat of divorce.

This is already a tricky comedic premise from the start. Zachary Scott plays it on the less likeable side and I can't like Larry. This really needs Larry to be purely innocent. Maybe Gaye could be a single mother friend who needs the money. That could solve their wartime relationship. He needs to have no ulterior motives. The misunderstanding needs to strictly be a mistake. This is never going to work.

Alexis Smith is bored. With at least two in help, there's not enough for her to do in her Manhattan apartment. So she tells husband Zachary Scott she wants to go back to work. He's all "My wife doesn't need to work!", but the seed is planted, and when he decides to hire an ex-girlfriend for a job, Miss Smith thinks she has it. When she finds out the truth, they bust up.

Once upon a time, I seem to have liked this comedy directed by Peter Godfrey. I enjoyed Scott's mugging. I enjoyed the quiet cynicism of Ransom Sherman as Miss Smith's uncle, and the needy cupidity of Jim Backus in his film debut. But it seems my tastes have changed, and my newfound dissatisfaction centers on Miss Smith. If she doesn't have enough to do, how about firing the staff and doing some of the housework herself? How about some socially useful work? As soon as I was in school, my mother started volunteering at the local VA hospital. How about getting a part-time job without discussing it?

I won't even suggest having a baby.

I still enjoy the mugging and so forth, but the underpinnings of this comedy, about the bumpy return to normalcy -- whatever that means -- in the post-war years, have not aged well, and if there's any of that in the subtext, it's buried deep. Increasingly I find that a comedy with nothing to say about anything except "Aren't they silly!" shouldn't take 65 minutes to say it in, like this one does. The Joe MacDoakes series of shorts that Warner Brothers was producing could've done it in 8.

This "light" comedy sinks like a lead weight, but interestingly enough it conveys a great deal about American post-war social mores and trends. Scott and Smith ( both better cast elsewhere in stylish noirs)are immediately identified with some contempt as exemplars of "those stubborn people who insist on inhabiting large urban centers (like New York) just to prove it can be done." Smith is a frustrated housewife immensely bored, unable to think of anything to do but go back to work which her husband won't allow despite her demeaning wheedling. If he would allow it, people would think he is unable to support her. Meanwhile he is trying to get a former female military friend appointed as his assistant manager. When Smith, the wife, happens upon the two at a business luncheon she automatically assumes her husband has been having an ongoing affair with the woman. The ensuing reversals of unfunny awkwardness has both husband and wife alternately whimpering childishly for forgiveness or spitefully and childishly thwarting/disowning the other. It's easy to see why these two have no children and it has nothing to do with their Hays code separate beds. They are just too busy being children themselves. This unattractive pattern of married life was immortalized in the 50's on TV with the moronic baby-talking Lucy vs. the hotheaded petty tyrant Desi, a formula which long outstayed its welcome if not its popularity. Doubtlessly when this rather slavishly conforming couple joins the imminent exodus to what will become the stultifyingly homogenous suburbia their offspring, if any, would be among the first refugees heading for Haight-Ashbury.