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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.

Really, what's not to like? I'd watch Natalie Wood read the phone book, and this flick left me wondering why Tony Curtis wasn't a bigger star, and why Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall were relegated to second-tier parts (though their roles were prominent).

Wood plays Helen Gurley Brown, author of the hit book of the film's name, and Curtis plays a magazine editor of a successful, seedy magazine that thrives on digging up dirt on people. Curtis sets his sights on scandalizing the virgin Brown. The laughs are many and frequent, with numerous subtle and not-so-subtle puns sprinkled liberally throughout. On the not-so-subtle side,the opening scene with magazine employees meeting with the CEO in the Board Room continually plays off the concept of the magazine seeking to feed off the lowest common denominator of human indecency. Another example occurred as cars raced along the highway, a sign noted that the highway's extension would be opening in December 1960. That was struck through and replaced with dates in 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1964, all struck through and ultimately replaced with something like "to be determined". I can connect with that jab even today.

Watching the movie caused me to research the 1962 book. Interestingly, the movie was loosely inspired by the book. And I mean loosely. The book is somewhat of a how-to guide, whereas the movie is a fictional imagining of the life of a much-younger Helen Gurley Brown, who was 40 at the publication of the book but 23 in the movie. Likely the movie's title was largely intended to parlay off the book's popularity. Good marketing.

It was also interesting and melancholy to note that the longtime delightful bit-part actress who played Emma Brand/Watson on the Andy Griffith Show, Cheerio Meredith, and had a minor role here, died on release day, 12/25/64. Burt Mustin also had a bit part. I always find it interesting to see actors such as Meredith and Mustin, who I mostly know from varying TV roles.

As usual, I loved seeing the sets and 60s style. I'm fascinated with the decade and enjoy seeing society's attitudes, fashions, and ideals in that era. This film brings that to life in spades.

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!!

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.

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.