Welcome to the first week of my Autumn with Jack feature.
I watched the movie Phffft with Jack Lemmon, Judy Holliday, and Kim Novak on a whim at the beginning of this year.
Don’t ask me how to pronounce it and movie makers didn’t want you to try which is why their promotional materials announced: “Don’t say it – see it!”
This was my third Jack Lemmon film I’ve ever seen and it was quirky and fun one.
Released in 1954, the movie is about a married couple who divorce but fail at being divorced.
That sounds weird doesn’t it? Which is what makes the movie fun.
This movie came right after Jack’s breakthrough role in It Should Happen To You, also with Judy Holliday.
Phffft was directed by Mark Robson, for whatever that is worth to those of you who don’t know directors. I am one of those people much of the time.
We start the film with Jack doing something I commonly see in my house — reading a comic.
Nina is clearly annoyed with this activity and she’s been annoyed for a while. She’s trying to figure out how to tell him that she wants a divorce. Finally, she just blurts it out.
He says he’s been wanting a divorce too. Before we know it, our main characters are actually divorced and while they seem confident at times that they made the right decision there are other times you can hear the hesitation in their voice.
We learn about how these two met, how their marriage progressed, and eventually fell apart, through flashbacks as they talk to their friends or family.
They met when Robert helped Nina with her accounts. He was an attorney with the Navy at the time. She was a producer of radio and then television soap operas for NBC.
As Robert interacts with his scummy friend Charlie (Jack Carson), he reflects on his early days with Nina. Soon, though, Charlie is urging him to get out on the dating scene again, stop thinking about his ex-wife.
Charlie tries to date and one of those women he tries to date is portrayed by Kim Novak. That date is a disaster because she’s much younger than Robert, but also a bit of a ditz and a floozy. To me she was really putting on a Marilyn Monroe type act with him — breathy voice and coyness and all.
Throughout the movie, Nina and Robert keep running into each other, always trying to pretend they are doing better than they are while Nina’s mother and Charlie keep pushing them to get a new partner. They seem to think moving on with someone new will solve all of Robert and Nina’s problems.
If you want to know what ultimate becomes of the two, you’ll have to watch the movie.
Judy Holliday was sick with a viral infection during the film and later said she didn’t remember some of her scenes when she saw them later.
“It was the strangest sensation seeing the rushes of those scenes,” she told a magazine at the time. “I couldn’t even remember having done them and yet most of them were just fine. I’d made them when I was half-drugged, but I guess I just instinctively did the right thing.”
The movie was based on an unproduced play by George Axelrod, who also wrote The Seven Year Itch (1955) — which starred Marilyn and had many similarities but had been purchased by another studio.
This explains why Kim’s character was so much like Marilyn. The script called for it.
According to TCM, “Phffft made it to the screen first because The Seven Year Itch was still in production on Broadway, and under the terms of the movie agreement could not be filmed until the play’s run was over.”
Back to the title of the film, Jack had a specific memory to the final decision on the title.
“The thing I remember best about it was an emergency break that was called while we were filming a big ballroom scene,” he said. “[Director] Mark Robson had to shut everything down while he went to a front-office meeting. There must have been a hundred extras, plus all the technicians, just sitting around waiting for two and a half hours with money just pouring down the tubes. When Mark finally came back, he was in hysterics. I asked him what the meeting had been about, what was so urgent? ‘It was a meeting about a title change,’ he said. ‘They changed it from Phfffft to Phffft. They took out an f.'”
Have you seen this one? If not, I do recommend it for a fun escape.
Next up for my Autumn of Jack is It Should Happen to You, which was released the same year as Phffft and also sees Judy Holliday as his co-star, as I mentioned above.
Here is my full list of Jack Lemmon movies I am watching:
Phffft (September 18)
It Should Happen To You (September 24)
The Fortune Cookie (Oct 2)
The Apartment (Oct. 8)
My Fellow Americans (Oct. 15)
The Notorious Landlady (Oct. 22)
The Odd Couple (Oct. 29)
Irma Dey Deuce (November 5)
Save the Tiger (November 12)
Sources
https://www.tcm.com/articles/155198/phffft
https://letterboxd.com/film/phffft/reviews/rated/none
If you are interested in more reviews or blog posts about old movies, you can find a link to my past reviews at the top of the page and you can also visit The Classic Movie Blog Association.
