Once More With Feeling (1960)

When the wife (Kay Kendall) of a narcissistic and high strung orchestra conductor (Yul Brynner) catches him with a young girl (Shirley Anne Field), she leaves him. When she wants to get married again, she asks for a divorce but there's one small problem ..... they were never married in the first place! So they must secretly get married and then divorced (this is 1960 after all) so she'll be free to marry again. But the conductor, who's still in love with her, has other plans. Based on an only modestly successful Broadway farce by Harry Kurnitz (who also wrote the screenplay), material like this needs to sparkle like champagne. What we get is a drink of tepid water. Watching the actors flapping around in an attempt to induce laughter, one calmly listens to the dull dialog thinking, "Oh, there's supposed to be a laugh here" as you sit there stone faced. Brynner is all wrong for this kind of farce that cries out for a Rex Harrison or even a Danny Kaye. He just doesn't have the comic timing needed. Kendall (who died at 33 before the film opened) looks stunning in her Givenchy outfits, fares better but nothing is going to help. It's a static film that lazily doesn't even bother to hide its stage bound roots. Directed by Stanley Donen (SINGIN' IN THE RAIN), who usually has a better touch for material like this. With Gregory Ratoff, rechanneling his Max Fabian from ALL ABOUT EVE and Martin Benson.