Phffft!

The title alone would make me interested in seeing it. I always wondered about it, and now I learn that this was what Walter Winchell would write in his gossip column when a couple’s marriage was on the rocks. It’s a George Axelrod script that looks a little stagy, but it was written for the screen. (Axelrod wrote some very good romantic comedy plays, and some excellent original screenplays and adaptations, among them The Manchurian Candidate.) Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday get divorced in the first ten minutes, then spend the rest of the film discovering how much they still need and love each other. This might have been pretty routine, but in the hands of those two it really sparkles.

This was the second Lemmon/Holliday movie of 1954, the other being Jack Lemmon’s first screen role in It Should Happen to You, so I guess you could say they had pretty good chemistry. I think it’s fair to say that Judy Holliday got Lemmon’s career started. I also am sure that, if Holliday had not died so young, at the age of 44, she would be remembered by more people as she should be, which is as one of the very best there was. She won the Oscar for Born Yesterday, over such competition as Anne Baxter and Bette Davis in All About Eve, and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.