Such Good Friends (1971)

The upscale Manhattan wife (Dyan Cannon) of an author of children's books and magazine art director (Laurence Luckinbill) thinks she has the perfect marriage. But when her husband goes into a coma after a minor operation, she discovers the double life he'd been leading and she begins to unravel. Based on the best seller by Lois Gould (with a screenplay by Elaine May writing under a pseudonym), this Otto Preminger film never finds the right tone that could make it all work. This kind of comedy of life among the upper East Side Manhattan creative elite would be perfected at the end of the decade by Woody Allen, who soared with it while Preminger just stumbles. A couple of scenes which should be funny come across as crude and awkward. An unpleasant sexual encounter between Cannon and James Coco, for example, is just tasteless and did we really need to see a nude Burgess Meredith? I may not recover for months. Cannon is very good here though by all accounts she and Preminger loathed working with each other. The score by Thomas Z. Shepard (more famous as a record producer) is near non existent though the end credit song Suddenly It's All Tomorrow is lovely. The large cast includes Ken Howard, Jennifer O'Neill, Nina Foch, Rita Gam, Doris Roberts, Sam Levene, Nancy Guild, Lawrence Tierney, William Redfield, Clarice Taylor, Virginia Vestoff, Louise Lasser and Elaine Joyce.