how to murder your wife

November 6 movie: How to Murder Your Wife. Forget Gigli, this was the worst movie ever made. Or at least, the worst movie I saw last weekend. It was without a doubt the most mysogynist movie I've ever seen. And that includes Boys Night Out and A Guide for the Married Man. I wouldn't have minded that if it had been funny like A Guide for the Married Man.

Jack Lemmon stars as an inveterate bachelor/newspaper cartoonist, who lives with his butler Terry-Thomas. Lemmon gets super drunk one night and wakes up the next morning married to the girl who jumped out of the cake, a sexy Italian woman who speaks no English. She proceeds to ruin his life by cooking him fattening foods, watching TV in bed, and girling up his space age bachelor pad. So he plots her murder -- in the cartoon only, of course. Unfortunately he always photographs himself acting out his cartoon stories and uses the photos to draw the cartoons. And witnesses see him acting out the murder (with a dummy), and his poor wife disappears at the same time, and so he's charged with murder. Instead of proving his innocence on the stand, he gives a speech explaining that women are so hateful that any man who could get rid of his wife without consequences would do it in a heartbeat. He is instantly acquitted by the all-male jury and carried out of the courtroom on their shoulders. He goes home, discovers his wife waiting naked in bed, and decides he loves her after all. The End. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it?

The one funny thing about this movie is the huge gay subtext running through it. The relationship between Lemmon and Thomas is totally gay, and when Lemmon winds up married, Thomas walks out in a huff to go work for another bachelor. All the men in the movie, all of them, dislike and avoid women. They don't even hate their wives and screw their mistresses; they just want to be away from women. At one point the wife sneaks into the locker room of Lemmon's all-male club. How do you think a bunch of guys in the 60s would react to a super-sexy woman in their locker room? I think she'd be lucky to get out alive. But these guys squeal and hide like eighth grade girls who found a boy in the girl's bathroom. Women are just plain icky to these men.