WHAT A WAY TO GO! (1964)

Rich widow Shirley MacLaine wants to give her entire fortune, 211 million dollars, to the government and the government thinks she's crazy, so we see her tell her story in flashback to psychiatrist Bob Cummings. It turns out she's been widowed four times in her life, and all four husbands wound up with huge fortunes that were left to her. As a young girl in the small town of Crawleyville, her mother encourages her to marry a member of the rich Crawley family (Dean Martin) but instead she marries simple and unambitious merchant Dick Van Dyke, who soon builds his rustic little store into a booming business. He becomes a workaholic and drops dead of exhaustion. Next, while visiting Paris, MacLaine falls for cab driver and struggling artist Paul Newman. After they marry, he invents a huge mechanical device that automatically paints abstract images on large canvases, becomes famous, and winds up dead at the hands of his malfunctioning machine. When she misses a flight back to the States, business tycoon Robert Mitchum takes her back in his private jet—they marry and she convinces him to retire to a quiet life on a farm, but when he tries to milk a bull, he dies from getting kicked in the head by the bull. Finally, she meets small-time entertainer Gene Kelly who works at a local steakhouse. He wears clown makeup and uses goofy novelties and is generally ignored by patrons, but when MacLaine suggests he pare his act down to his real talent for singing and dancing, he becomes massively popular, buys a mansion and has it all painted pink. He too dies an early death. Will our poor rich widow ever find lasting happiness?

The goofy opening sets the tone for this farcical comedy: Shirley MacLaine, in her widow’s weeds, leaves her pink mansion as pallbearers drop the coffin containing Kelly which careens out of control. There isn't much of a story here, or even any real lessons to be learned, but as a revue-type entertainment, it's fun. During the flashbacks, each relationship is portrayed briefly in a fantasy sequence like a Hollywood movie: with Van Dyke, it's a slapstick silent film; with Newman, a French art film; with Mitchum, a glossy melodrama during which MacLaine changes into elaborate gowns with each new scene; and with Kelly, a musical (of course). These are fantasy scenes set in a movie that is all glossy Technicolor fantasy, so the risk of overload is always present, but mostly the viewer remains engaged, if only to see how each marriage will go sideways—MacLaine is often unhappy with her husbands' changes but the marriages themselves never really fracture until the husbands die. Of course, the death aspect would lead one to believe that this is mostly dark comedy, but the surface performances and cotton-candy visuals steer us away from too much gloomy contemplation of the various widowhoods. You can't really judge acting here, just the ability of the performers to entertain without going too far over the top or woodenly missing the mark. MacLaine is perfect, and Van Dyke and Newman both come close to matching her. Mitchum is a bit on the wooden side, and Kelly seems lost, like he didn't quite get the joke (though of course his dancing with MacLaine is very nice indeed). It's fun to see Margaret Dumont, grand straight woman to the Marx Brothers, in a small role as MacLaine's mother. When MacLaine is disappointed that Van Dyke has put off their vacation to Rome, he tells her, "Get yourself a couple of art books and a box of spaghetti." In the Hollywood epic scene, Robert Mitchum asks, "What are you doing after the orgy?" one of a few jokey references to Fox's Cleopatra from the year before. I liked this one, and even when it started feeling a bit long, the costumes and visuals were always a treat. Pictured are Mitchum and MacLaine in a gigantic glass of champagne. [TCM]