HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE: the only victim here is the viewer

In his prime few could best Bob Hope in the delivery of a joke. His timing was impeccable even if the material was often corny. By 1969, when HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE was released, he'd slowed to the speed of an arthritic snail on sedatives and the gags were even worse.
They're as creaky as the knee and hip joints of Hope and his co-star Jane Wyman.
This film really had no business being made.

It's an embarrassment to everyone involved and it's difficult to discern just who the intended audience was.
It's clearly not the nation's groovy swinging youth who are relentlessly mocked and demeaned as gullible, simple-minded and vacuous, and it hardly paints a positive picture of the older generation either, the parents who were apparently so disapproving of the lifestyle of their teenage offspring.
Hope and Wyman are an old married couple who run out of patience for each other's annoying habits and decide to divorce. But their plans are interrupted by the unexpected arrival home of their angelic daughter Nancy (JoAnna Cameron) with fiance David (a very young Tim Matheson) in tow.  She wants to get married right away and live a life as full of love as her parents. Not wanting to shatter her illusions they conceal their divorce from her, but she finds out at the altar and decides to live 'in sin' with David instead.
I know this is going on a bit but I'm trying to keep it as short as possible so please stick with me.
They join a band, The Comfortable Chairs, managed by David's huckster father Oliver (Jackie Gleason), and when Nancy becomes pregnant they decide to give the baby up for adoption. Her appalled - and divorced - parents reunite under a fake name to adopt the baby and raise it until their daughter comes to her senses.
Hilarity ensues.
Actually it doesn't.

Hope has abandoned the earlier egotistical coward persona which had proved so successful in the 1930s and 40s and replaced it with a bland, self satisfied, corporate-America complacency which offers nothing to laugh at or engage with. He's just another wealthy Beverly Hills suit who's traded in his 'old' wife for a blonde, busty younger model, and is now going through the motions of life at a severely reduced speed.

Gleason substitutes bluster and noise for actual humour, while Wyman displays a shocking lack of talent for comedy but an impressive ability to look even older than Hope despite being 14 years younger. The only real laughs come from a trained chimpanzee inserted into the story for no good reason other than director Norman Panama needed to pad out the running time by an extra 15 minutes.
Dated even when it was made, HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE is tired, tiresome and pointless. It drags on like an over-long, unnecessarily elaborate and spectacularly unfunny sitcom and effectively ended the big screen careers of both Hope and Wyman. On the evidence of this film they must have wished they'd firmed up their cinematic retirement plans a little earlier.