LUV (1967)

On a New York City bridge, the bedraggled and despairing Harry (Jack Lemmon) is about to jump to his death when he is saved, more or less accidentally, by a wandering well-dressed fellow named Milt (Peter Falk). It turns out that the two were good friends in college, but fifteen years have gone by. Milt is married, makes decent money at an office job and has a side business selling junk. Harry, on the other hand, who was ambitious in college, is alone, neurotic, and suicidal, partly because he's never been in love. Milt decides take Harry under his wing. Milt's wife Ellen (Elaine May) is lovely but unhappy, particularly with the downturn of their sex life (the frequency of which, or lack thereof, she plots on a large chart). For his part, Milt has fallen for Linda (Nina Wayne), a young sexy exercise instructor. Milt comes up with a plan: get Harry to woo Ellen so she will divorce him and he can marry Linda. It works but soon Ellen gets tired of Harry's bizarre behavior--he has spells of hysterical blindness and deafness--and Milt gets tired of Linda's lack of ambition (one morning, she won't get out of bed, claiming to be "tired… from all those years of calisthenics!"). Milt and Ellen realize they are still in love and Milt initiates another plan: get Harry interested in Linda. When that backfires, there's one more solution: get Harry back on the bridge and push him to his death.

From that summary, you may not have figured out that this is a comedy. It's based on a hit 1964 play which had just three characters (Harry, Milt and Ellen) and one physical setting (the bridge), and was apparently theater of the absurd crossed with mainstream slapstick. The movie opens the setting up into the real world of New York City (though a Coney Island amusement park scene was shot in California) and heightens the slapstick, and that's where it gets in trouble. The opening ten minutes on the bridge with just Lemmon and Falk is delightful, but once they wander off into the streets and bars and houses, the proceedings begin to feel heavy and fussy. The manic, existential mood of some of the humor falls flat or feels sour in realistic settings. Falk (looking truly handsome for perhaps the only time in his career) and May (sexy and funny) are very good, and their scenes together often overcome the stylistic bumps, but sadly, the talented Jack Lemmon is just not right here, painfully overacting and making the slapsticky moments drag. There are two exceptions: a scene in which the central trio try to outdo each other with painful memories of their awful childhoods (Monty Python would riff on this a few years later--"There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road!"), and a later scene involving elevator mayhem in a department store, in which Lemmon just basically stands still and lets things happen around him. Lemmon's best moment is a quiet one: Ellen tries to convince Harry that he's actually a latent homosexual and is love with Milt--you can see Lemmon give it some thought, cock his eyes oddly, then dismiss it. More subtlety overall might have made this work, but the few truly fun moments--the ending, which goes back to the bridge, is good--aren't quite worth sitting through 90 minutes of irritating schtick. Pictured are May and Lemmon. [DVD]