Cinema: Squaring the Triangle

Not with My Wife, You Don’t! Triangles are square. But if one is carefully constructed with the right angle of absurdity and a base line of chatter, it can occasionally make intriguing trigonometry. The angle in this picture, as it happens, is pretty obtuse: the Air Farce, according to the script, is a gland-based gang of joystick jockeys who do almost nothing but make low-level attacks on garters of opportunity. As a result, the triangle in this picture is anything but acute. But it’s cute, real cute.

At the apex stands Virna Lisi, a quail with two hot pilots on her tail. Lieut. Tony Curtis bags her first, but Flight

Commander George C. Scott promptly pulls some ranky-pranky: he sends Tony off on rest cure and then merrily moves in for the kill. Tony in retaliation tells Virna that Scott has “grabbed the Big Knob” in combat over Korea, and then merrily marries the girl before his rival can edit the obit. Scott in reprisal busts up the formation again. Tony is shipped off to arctic survival school, where the poor twerp shaves in leftover coffee, sleeps with a nice warm sled dog and sits miserably slurping puree of blubber in the path of a polar blizzard. Scott meanwhile reclines contentedly (though temporarily) in the soft white arms of Tony’s missus, who comfily explains: “I’ve always wanted two of everything.”

From the customer’s point of view, it is unfortunate that she does not want two of Scott, an actor of range and brilliance both on stage (The Merchant of Venice, Desire Under the Elms] and screen (The Hustler, Dr. Strangelove). In Wife, he rises above all the plane foolishness to present a perfect caricature of the square-jawed joe on the Air Force recruiting poster. Curtis and Lisi do well to look competent in his company. And some congratulations are due Director Norman Panama, who keeps this airy nothing whooshing along so briskly that audiences may fail to notice how much of the ho ho is really just ho hum.