How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life (1968)

Nate Monaster and Stanley Shapiro had written the hit That Touch of Mink, an unlikely but very satisfying comedy starring Doris Day and Cary Grant. In How to Save a Marriage they recapture that bachelor verses girlfriend spirit in another unlikely comedy of errors that takes place in a pre-feminist fantasy world where playboy executives install their mistresses in a lavish New York City apartment building tailored to accommodate their liaisons.

Even though That Touch of Mink had been a success, it was clear that Doris Day was becoming too old to keep playing a naive lamb among the hungry wolves. Although a sure boxoffice performer, her mid-forties virgin-on-the-run persona was beginning to distract from the comedy of the sexes. It was time to update the star.

Stella Stevens may not have the experienced comedy skills of Day, but she is lovely in creampuff hair that says “look, don’t touch”, surrounded in pastel appliances and a dream apartment. She’s photographed in Moss Mabry’s eye-popping fashions as if for women’s magazine covers, setting her against minimal hued domestic backgrounds that contrast or compliment her colors.

Stevens and Dean Martin had a proven chemistry. Two years earlier they’d made a funny spoof out of what was otherwise an embarrassingly bad spy caper The Silencers (1966). She had the ability to make Dino seem like he was acting (as proof the scenes without Stevens really clunk, and watching Eli Wallach ad lib to cover up Martin’s flubbed lines is painful). Stevens puts her own edgeier on the innocent female routine.

When Dino discovers he has deceived a woman who may indeed be perfect and is now trapped by his own cover story, Stella Stevens twists the knife and becomes almost Stepford. She starts examining his habits so she can anticipate his every need, and creating a bedtime bathroom ritual to the drone of the dishwasher that would leave any confirmed bachelor with the heebie-jeebies.

Aided by her neighbor Muriel (Anne Jackson) the real other woman and a matronly know-it-all when it comes to men, and a cynical landlady (Betty Field) who has become embittered watching so many girls get used and replaced in the building, Stevens begins to realize what kind of situation she’s gotten herself into. The three women begin to plot revenge pushing Martin around like a cat’s paw until he is ready to come to terms, negotiate a pension for Harry’s mistress, and preserve Stella’s reputation for future marriage.