HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE: and outstay your welcome

This 1965 battle of the sexes comedy is crying out for the deft touch of director Billy Wilder. What it gets is the rather more heavy hand of Richard Quine who fails to get the best out of his star, Jack Lemmon or the material.
HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE was a rare misstep for Lemmon at the midway point of a hugely successful decade long creative streak which had already produced 'Some Like it Hot', 'The Apartment', 'Irma La Douce' and 'Days of Wine and Roses', with 'The Fortune Cookie'. 'The Odd Couple', 'The Out of Towners' and 'Save the Tiger' still to come. Wilder directed him in four of these and would have made a better job of HTMYW than Quine did.
Lemmon plays Stanley Ford, the creator of a wildly successful newspaper cartoon strip depicting the exploits of Bash Brannigan. He lives an idyllic bachelor lifestyle in his Manhattan town house, waited on hand and foot by his devoted valet Charles (Terry-Thomas). Both men have nothing but scorn for the institution of marriage so when Stanley wakes up the morning after a friend's drunken stag party to find himself married to the young lady who jumped out of the cake, his entire world turns upside down.

Stanley incorporates his change of lifestyle into his cartoon strip but when he decides to have Bash murder his wife at the same time as Mrs Ford disappears he is arrested and charged with her murder.
All this plays out rather too slowly to maintain meaningful forward momentum. The story is stretched beyond it's natural length as the script is milked for every last drop of misogynistic humour, taxing even the prodigious comedic talents of Lemmon and Thomas.
Not helping matters is the casting of Virna Lisi as the Italian cake model. Lisi was one of those interchangeable European models slash actresses Hollywood became enamoured with in the 1960s, and who were brought over to add exotic glamour to numerous American films. She tries her best but she's no match for Lemmon and Thomas.
If this film had been 15 minutes shorter I'd have liked it a lot better. As it is it outstays its welcome and left me with visions of what might have been in the hands of Mr Wilder.