Divorce Sixties Style

I wouldn't have been caught dead going to see this movie in 1967. I was way too cool for this kind of drivel. Forty plus years later, it's a fascinating look at mid-Sixties' suburbia. If you long for the old days & ways: smoking in public, drinking like a fish, wearing ladylike clothes, a bar in your basement, precociously wise kids and a single salary supports a family of four, this is the movie for you.

Everyone smokes; the housekeeper irons and smokes at the same time (multi-tasking!); the husbands smoke & drink hard liquor alot a la Mad Men. Tim Matheson, my favorite Animal, plays the oldest son. The upper middle class home about-to-be-bequeathed-in-the-settlement is worth $50,000 (can't find a starter trailer for that nowaways!). The live- in housekeeper makes $250 per month. Top salesman, Jason Robards, makes $32,000 per year and it's good money except for the alimony he's paying ex-wife, Jean Simmons. To solve this financial problem, he's pimping her out, in a manner of speaking, to the best potential new provider. She looks gorgeous; still elegant and perky. Makes me remember a movie she did a few years later called "The Happy Ending"; another movie about marriage but not the least bit lighthearted. Great song came out of that movie, "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" by that most talented of movie songwriting couples, the Bergmans. They also wrote "The Way We Were" my all time favorite love song.

Ahhh, suburban nostalgia from the Sixties. And the movie isn't half bad either. Really!