GEORGE AXELROD. I had no idea he was still alive, or I would have sent a fan letter before he died. Now that the screenwriter/director is gone, I'll tell you why I would have.
There's a strain in American film that has been too little examined. When we think of sex-comedy movies, we tend to think of classy, wised-up offerings like those of Preston Struges or Ernst Lubitsch. These guys couldn't show a lot of skin or use dirty words, but their characters obviously heard the old goat-song and were motivated by it to do some wacky things. A celibate professor might put a shady dame up in his sanctum sanctorum, for example, if her gams were appealing. There was a shared perception among audience and moviemaker alike that the power of sexual attraction was the topic (Topic A, Sturges used to call it) that had motivated comedy from the dawn of dramaturgy.
But in the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s, stateside sex comedies took on a deciedly neurotic aspect. I'll spare you the convoluted social and aesthetic bloodlines, but the short version might go like this: as American sexual mores began to loosen, popular artists felt the pull and felt compelled to go with it. Of course, to go
all the way with it would have been too much for everyone concerned -- it's one thing for some garretted bohemian to tear the frilly nightdress off the American libido, but makers of fun entertainments for the masses didn't want to live in garrets (though they might go to parties in them) -- they wanted to
stay popular.
Still, everybody knew the jig was up -- the country was rich and leisured, and not everyone was passing their suburban evenings with mah jong and Uncle Miltie. Eventually you couldn't
not talk about sex, but you couldn't tell all you knew, either.
This made for what we might charitably call creative tension. Moviemakers began pushing the envelope, as we now say, but they also had to pay obesiance to the power of suppression -- the newly-hip audience may have been making new demands, but the Hayes Code was still making its old ones. So we started getting Ross Hunter movies,
Good Neighbor Sam,
Kiss Me, Stupid,
A Guide for the Married Man,
Sex and the Single Girl,
Under the Yum Yum Tree, etc. -- pictures in which sex was hyped up to an alarming degree. The pursuit of partners in these pictures seems almost panic-stricken. The pull of lust was shown, not as a little spark that made the world go round, but as a tornado that blew men around like uprooted trees. Still, conventional morality was more or less restored by the end of each -- albeit a little the worse for wear.
It may be said that Axelrod was one of the founding fathers of the neurotic sex comedy.
The Seven Year Itch, his first hit, was mainly about a middle-class guy ineptly trying to screw his neighbor. As the neighbor was Marilyn Monroe, not much explanation was required. In the Billy Wilder film version, made in 1955, the guy doesn't go through with it -- though in Axelrod's original Broadway play, he did. Axelrod reportedly resented this modification. Of course the play couldn't be filmed as it was. But something was eating at Axelrod. There was a wrecker in him, albeit one domesticated by an aversion to garrets.
Axelrod went west and wrote, among other films,
Goodbye Charlie and
How to Murder Your Wife. These pictures are at times literally astonishing -- not good, just astonishing. The men in them seem, for the most part, crazed with lust, yet highly uncomfortable with its consequences.
Charlie, in which a deceased womanizer comes back to earth as Debbie Reynolds and his old pal falls in love with him/her, would give Sigmund Freud nightmares. And the courtroom scene in
How To Murder Your Wife whips the vague resentments males feel toward the restrictions of marriage and social status into a delirious rage -- climaxing with Jack Lemmon convincing the male jurors that
any man would kill to be freed from his marital chains. Maybe the audience was supposed to take all this as good-humored ribbing between the sexes, but my nostrils detect a whiff of gasoline and old rags when I watch them.
Axelrod did some fine things --
The Manichurian Candidate among them -- but for me his apotheosis is
Lord Love a Duck. He wrote, directed, and produced it, and it failed miserably at the box office. The style is a kind of SoCal magic realism, in which the erotically compelled characters of his earlier work become almost literal automatons, mouthing conformist platitudes between eye-rolling bouts of sexual frenzy. Above all this is Roddy McDowell (!) as a living imp of the perverse -- but a curiously unsexed one. He obsesses on a shallow but ambitious California teenager played by Tuesday Weld (!), but he doesn't seem to want to fuck her -- merely to amuse and enable her with his magical power to grant all her wishes. At first he vicariously enjoys her rakette's progress through the social gauntlet of suburban life. Weld drives men literally mad, knows it, and uses it. Her very presence causes her high school principal (Harvey Korman) to devour pencils; she even vamps her estranged father, in one thoroughly unwholesome sequence, so that he'll buy her the multiple sweaters she needs to join the cool girls of the school.
McDowell hates all these people, and happily smooths her path, even arranging an advantageous marriage for her to a thoroughly hypocritical square he detests. But then he starts to crack. He slowly destroys the square, and then decides this isn't a large enough gesture of contempt -- and mows down all his adversaries by running a bulldozer into the high school graduation. The story ends with McDowell in prison, proclaiming his love for Weld -- who goes on to become a movie star.
Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.
