Absolutely brilliant

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

In 1963, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was the 3rd grossing film. In 1964, three Peter Sellers films were in the top 15. Is it any wonder that a studio might try to capture that madcap silliness? As it turns out, Sex and the Single Girl (SATSG) was the 20th grossing film of 1964, so they got what they wanted. And perhaps the film-going public did too.Looking back at this film now, however, does not do it any favors. Though its title might suggest a semi-serious film about liberating women from their roles and the expectations of society, SATSG is nothing like that. It is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at humor that, in the end, is nothing more than a series of gags. Unfortunately, most of what is intended as humor is rather lame and not worthy of an issue of Mad Magazine. These gags are more appropriate for an episode of The Carol Burnett Show and would have been performed better there.There's a flat joke about automats and the automation of America. A man in a frilly woman's robe. Fonda and Bacall twisting to a song that is not appropriate for twisting. Water coming out of the mouth of someone who was dunked in the ocean. The only gag that works is about two men in golfcarts chasing their balls.Accompanying this annoying attempt at humor is an insipid soundtrack, replete with rimshots and silly sound effects.This film has nothing to say. And the characters are just silly caricatures, so you can't really care about what happens to them. SATSG has a wonderful cast, totally misspent. Every actor has many quality films to his credit (except Larry Storch), so it's painful to see them in this shallow, unfunny vehicle. Consider Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, and Mel Ferrer.There is a nostalgic joy in seeing any of these actors in a film, but that was the extent of my interest in this film. A waste of time and talent.

Henry Fonda gave an interview with Canadian television channel TVO in which he discussed the "compromises" an actor has to make in order to keep his career alive, in his case, in order to be able to make quality films such as Twelve Angry Men and The Oxbow Incident. Looking chagrined, he revealed that Sex and the Single Girl was a movie he made in order to have a box office success and keep his name in the Win column of the studios. He said he was ashamed of Sex and the Single Girl, calling it a box office success but "dreadful"--so ashamed that he didn't like even mentioning its name. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but this is certainly far from a good movie.http://ww3.tvo.org/ video/182894/ henry-fonda-compromise-making-bad-movies

I knew that Sex and the Single Girl was going to be one of those 1950s-1960s films that depict a woman with a professional career or a business as an incompetent, unfeminine woman who just needs to find a husband and give up this silly career idea. But I didn't know that Sex and the Single Girl was going to be such a lamely done, poorly acted example of such a film.There are three things worth seeing in this film. The first is the great Edward Everett Horton as the fourth-generation publisher of STOP magazine. The bit where he congratulates his staff for turning the genteel magazine his great-grandmother founded into a sleazy, vulgar, highly profitable tabloid is a hoot. The second thing worth seeing also takes place at STOP headquarters. There's a running gag that shows that everything in the office has a coin meter attached, including the drinking fountain, the sink faucets, the mirrors and the paper towel dispensers in the men's room, etc. Also, during the much too long chase scene/slapstick silliness that is the last quarter of the film, munching on pretzels becomes a great running sight gag.Otherwise, the film is bad. Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall's supporting roles could have been delights, but their parts are poorly scripted and badly realized. The slapstick chase scene at the end goes on and on, flattening every laugh the situation might have generated.

I actually find this scatterbrained 1964 comedy a surprisingly amusing screwball farce all these years later despite its titillating title. So apparently does director Peyton Reed since he based most of his 2004 comic pastiche, "Down with Love", on the storyline of this movie and less so on any of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romps of the same era. Regardless, they all have the same brew of conjugal misunderstandings, mistaken identities and leering though never explicit sexuality because those were the days when a woman's virtue would never be compromised for anyone but the right man. Directed by the heavy-handed Richard Quine ("Paris When It Sizzles") and written by Joseph Heller (later the author of "Catch-22") and David R. Schwartz, this ridiculous comedy benefits from a game cast headed by Tony Curtis still riding high from "Some Like It Hot" (which is referred to for easy laughs in the story) and Natalie Wood who shows her comedy chops with dexterity here.Curtis plays Bob Weston, a sleazy magazine writer for a men's magazine whose editors are intent on exposing Dr. Helen Gurley Brown as a fraud as a sex expert. Author of the best-selling "Sex and the Single Girl", Brown is not at all the clench-jawed celebrity author who wrote the real book and appeared on "The Tonight Show" constantly. Instead, she is a gorgeous, intellectually prodigious 23-year-old who extols female empowerment in the bedroom. Showing off his moral depravity, Weston steals the marital woes of her next-door neighbors, pantyhose magnate Frank Broderick and his acerbic wife Sylvia, and comes to see Dr. Brown as a patient. The rest is predictable but still a good amount of fun. Curtis was still at the top of his game here showing how he can easily elicit laughs from such a vile manipulator, but it's Wood who surprises as Brown. Displaying a nervous but infectious energy that feeds nicely into the two sides of the doctor, she is funny and sexy in a way that she could never quite balance as well again in her career. Witness the hilariously conflicted drunken scene in her apartment for evidence of her talent.Quine was smart to cast three sharp stars in the key supporting roles - Henry Fonda as the put-upon Frank browbeaten into a sad man by Lauren Bacall pulling all the stops as the shrewish basket case Sylvia is, and Mel Ferrer as Brown's somewhat ambiguous colleague. Add a sultry Fran Jeffries who performs two numbers (including the title tune) for no apparent reason except to sell records, an even sexier Leslie Parrish ("The Manchurian Candidate") as Weston's secretary, and a genuinely funny extended car chase scene, and you have the makings of an under-appreciated sex comedy. The 2009 DVD, part of the six-disc "The Natalie Wood Collection", includes a Warner Brothers cartoon ("Nelly's Folly") and the original theatrical trailer.