Cinema: The New Pictures

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Facts of Life (H-L-P; United Artists) suggests that if the commercial comedians would only stop trying so hard to make people laugh, some of them might be funny. In this picture Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, sometime major magnates of the TV laugh industry, set out to make a quiet little country-club comedy—partly for the mass audience, but partly also for their own pleasure in reading good material again after all those years in the yak pastures. To their considerable amazement, they have produced the funniest U.S. film since The Apartment—a quick, slick, slyly satirical and sometimes wonderfully nutty comedy of middle-class manners and middle-aged morals.

Written, produced and directed by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, Facts of Life inquires with wicked glee into the nature of the tie that binds men and women in holy wedlock. Is it love? No, it is inertia; most married people remain faithful to each other because it is just too much trouble to cheat.

The theory is illustrated with the case of two middle-aged suburbanites—one male (Hope), one female (Ball), each happily married to somebody else—who have known and mildly disliked each other for years. Then, accidentally, they find themselves in Acapulco for a two-week vacation, alone together and falling in love. They fight it off, swim it off, laugh it off, in the end settle for a nice, safe, neuter idyl that is both hilarious and painful to watch.

Back home, the nonlovers realize suddenly how much they have missed, make a date one night to meet in a nearby town. Just as Hope is about to leave home, his wife reminds him that he has promised to take his son to a Cub Scout meeting. Furious, he drags the boy off, sits through an interminable report on Indian smoke signals, arrives for the date two hours late—too late to do anything but tool over to a drive-in theater. They settle down for some heavy necking, only to find that they are parked beside their mutual laundryman, who is peering at them curiously. Terrified, they duck their heads, scramble for the keys, bump heads, accidentally hit the horn—which sticks. Two minutes later, the whole drive-in audience is straining angrily to get a glare at them as they hastily back out. So it goes, at tryst after assignation after rendezvous, until finally in sheer exhaustion both parties decide that fidelity is the best policy.