Cinema: Rolling with Rock

A Very Special Favor was written by Stanley Shapiro (Pillow Talk, Operation Petticoat, Lover Come Back, Bedtime Story), which means that it is supposed to be hilariously off-color. Off-color it is.

Rock Hudson plays, if that is the word, an absolutely irresistible womanizer. This is subtly conveyed by showing luscious ladies giving Rock the keys to their apartments on sight, while others visit him each morning to cook his breakfast and pick up his laundry. To drive the point home, Hudson dials two girls simultaneously on two phones and tells them both at once that he’ll be around later that evening.

Charles Boyer (who presumably knew what he was doing when he signed on for this movie) is so impressed by Rock’s supermanhood that he pleads with him to seduce his priggish psychologist daughter, Leslie Caron, and thereby give her a taste of what she is missing in life. Because he owes Boyer a favor, Rock reluctantly but confidently tackles the job. He poses as a patient whose problem is that women constantly tear off their clothes the minute they see him. “What I’d give to have a body nobody wanted!” he sighs, and wonders if perhaps he shouldn’t have an operation to make him ugly.

After this situation has been squeezed for as many leers as possible, Rock tricks Leslie into thinking that she turns into a raving nymphomaniac after a few drinks. (Ha!) In revenge, she uses her psychological know-how to render Ladies’ Man Hudson impotent. (Ha-ha!) In counterrevenge, he pretends that she has made him homosexual; he shacks up in a motel with a girl who is dressed up to look like a pretty young man. (Ha-ha-ha!)

These goings-on, naturally, convince Charles Boyer that Rock would make an ideal son-in-law, so he sells Rock on the proposition by picturing the revenge he would have by marrying Leslie and “keeping her pregnant all the time—waddling around with a fat belly.” Which is exactly what he does. This desperately tasteless movie closes with a shot of them surrounded by six children, with more to come.