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A new feature of The Cad is Swank Film Classics. First up is...

BOEING BOEING

Released December 22, 1965
Stars Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, and Thelma Ritter

     With the current award-winning revival on Broadway, critics are finally starting to (having to?) backpedal on Boeing Boeing, but far from ever admitting they had all these years been wrong about the play, their reviews are littered with escape clauses  like ‘creaky farce gets makeover’ and ‘the forgettable film version with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis.’ Forgettable? Never mind the natural delivery between old friends Curtis and Lewis, to claim Thelma Ritter’s beautifully deadpan performance, John Rich’s fast-paced direction, Neal Hefti’s bouncy score, and Edith Head’s vibrant costumes as forgettable is to say, ‘I’ve never actually seen the picture, so I'll rely on Googled reviews to write my column'  To be sure, those who don’t know history are doomed to trash it.

      The smooth and witty bedroom farce concerns the troubles of Bernard Lawrence (Curtis), a foreign correspondent assigned to the Paris desk. He’s got himself a luxury apartment, a weary but dutiful housekeeper, and three lovely live-in fiancés, all stewardesses that he adeptly juggles by way of airline time-tables. This arrangement seems to have been going rather swimmingly for Bernard, but as progress is wont to do, it mucks things up as jets get faster and the world gets smaller: with the girls in the air less and less, Bernard’s margin for error is getting wider and wider. For a few days, the near misses keep piling up in Lawrence International, and gloating over his troubles is Lewis as Robert Reed, a colleague waiting for the whole enterprise to blow just so he can assume the operation: the apartment, the maid, and, of course, the girls, or some facsimile thereof.   The dialogue is as fast and sharp as any Billy Wilder comedy (short of One, Two, Three perhaps) and Ritter's resigned service to the three girls is remindful of Hattie McDaniel's brilliant performance in Alice Adams.



 
     That Boeing Boeing failed to garner praise in neither its film nor original Broadway version (it ran for only 23 performances when originally staged in 1965) is part of the documentation of America’s wholesale rejection of swank in the mid-sixties. Had it been filmed immediately on the heels of the successful 1962 London stage production, it might have been better received and  subsequently earned its rightful place as a classic film comedy, but with the cult of youth pushing on to full steam in ’66, everything in pre-Beatles America – cocktail lounges, tuxedos, the foxtrot - needed to be dismissed as hokey, or, yes, even creaky.  With the success of the new stage production, Boeing Boeing will probably see its official release on DVD, one as long overdue as the return of airline stewardesses as lovely as Mr. Lawrence’s.

Swank Factor: ratingsratingsratingsratings