One of my first great memories of watching movies on television is the night my older sister and I stayed up late on a Saturday to watch Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis in the comedy, Sex and the Single Girl. We laughed and laughed at Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall's funny dance (they were doing the Twist) in which nothing but their arms seemed to move; Larry Storch's bewildered CHP ("My motorcycle. My motorcycle!"); Rudy, Mel Ferrer's exasperating, shallow, wannabe gigolo co-worker of Wood's Dr. Helen Gurley Brown ("Oh, shut up, Rudy!"), and a myriad of other scene stealers. Coming home from a night out, my parents couldn't figure out what my sister and I found so amusing.
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| Poster art for the film |
If I remember correctly, I saw the movie for the first time in the late 1960s when it was just a few years old. I'm sure it was my sister's idea to watch the movie; at ten, I was far too young to appreciate the finer points of pretty much any movie. Not that SatSG has finer points. The movie was a kind of mid-Sixties screwball comedy disguised as a sex romp before the sexual revolution took place. By today's standards, it is more than a little bit innocent (or, you know, retrograde) in its attitude toward its titular subjects.
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| After supposedly saving his life, Natalie Wood's Helen Brown brings Curtis' Bob Weston back to her place to dry off in one of the film's sexiest scenes. |
A little background: Sex and the Single Girl was a non-fiction, self-help book written by Helen Gurley Brown. Originally published in 1962, the book attempted to aid single girls who wish to explore the world, including being single, having a career, and sex without marriage. Brown's book tried to show single women that a life alternative to the standard one of love and marriage might be both possible and preferable.
Sex and the Single Girl, the book, was a bestseller, but when Warner Brothers acquired the film rights, the studio had no idea how to adapt it for the screen. Ultimately, Warners kept only the book's title and its author's name for the main character. The rest of it went in the trash can. The studio had to make something (fictional--a documentary wasn't even considered) out of nothing, so why not a sex farce? Push convention as far as the early 1960s would allow, mix the ingredients, throw it against the wall, and see what stuck.
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| Bob Weston, playboy extraordinaire, listens as his next door neighbor, Frank Broderick (Henry Fonda), pours out his marital grief. |
What stuck was a sexy, occasionally raunchy, chauvinistic time capsule that was popular enough with audiences to land the film on Variety's list of the top twenty highest grossing movies of 1964. Though not popular today--seldom even remembered--Sex and the Single Girl does, indeed, transport me to a time when women in movies were still called girls (which never fails to knock me sideways), and the old (wink, wink) it's-ok-for-men-to-fool-around-but-women-cannot-even-look-at-a-man double standard still applied. The early-to-mid Sixties were rife with these kind of films, usually brought to America's movie screens with Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Sandra Dee, Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon, and Debbie Reynolds, among others. Some had a genuine wit or point of view (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) or were disguised as something other than they were (How to Murder Your Wife, Breakfast at Tiffany's), yet they all amounted to the same thing: the virgin will not become a nun ... or stay single.
In spite of its deep roots in traditional boy-meets-girl storytelling, Sex and the Single Girl was ahead of its time in some respects. After all, Sex and the City basically navigated the same terrain thirty-plus years later, albeit with a more contemporary (i.e., liberated) perspective. Appreciation of Sex and the Single Girl may depend on the viewer's frame of mind. When I first saw it, the storyline of a hack journalist setting out to expose the virginity of a sex therapist was titillating to me in the extreme. No matter how tame it looks today, there is a pretty frisky scene in the film in which Wood and Curtis turn down the lights while clothed only in revealing robes. Racy!
The movie plays out a veritable potpourri of mid-Sixties angst and cultural cliches. Tony Curtis's playboy character, Bob Weston, writes for STOP, a "filthy rag" of a magazine run almost exclusively by white, middle-aged-to-old men (fact is, Curtis seems the youngest, and he was nearly forty at the time). The clinic where Natalie Wood's Dr. Helen Gurley Brown works is as sexist as the STOP staff. And Bob's neighbors, Frank and Sylvia Broderick (he's a sad sack; she's a shrew), hilariously played by Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall, are crazy for each other yet do nothing but fight. When I watch the movie now, it's hard not to believe in that notion of the early Sixties as a more innocent time. I take joy in its extremely simple pleasures--broad comic farce played by an expert cast, the suggestion that a naked back is as sexy as a naked front, and a resolution in which they all live happily ever after.
If only life could be like this. <sigh>
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