Cinema: Labor's Lost

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Luv. A miserable New York intellectual hovers on the Manhattan Bridge, preparing to take the plunge. An old college chum happens by, pulls him down and speaks of love—the panacea for all spiritual ills. "I'm more in love today than on the day I married," he swears, "but my wife won't give me a divorce." Solution: wife swapping, with the intellectual taking over for the husband and the husband going off to his mistress. But the cure turns out to be worse than the disease. The intellectual's misery is contagious, and six weeks later everyone is even more wretched than before. In a frenzy, the exes reunite to get the suicide back on the bridge and into the water, where he belonged in the first place.

That, more or less, was the plot of Luv, one of the funniest Broadway plays of recent years. Transferred to the screen, the comedy of the absurd comes close to being a tragedy of the impossible. Author Murray Schisgal's original was a cockeyed but unerringly apt satire of people who make Freud their only poet, whose love talk is all about adjustment, alienation, angst and other pop-psychological cant. But this deft parody has given way to the adolescent vulgarisms of Scriptwriter Elliott Baker, who plots slapstick sequences in a department store and a Japanese restaurant that would be tasteless in a Jerry Lewis movie.

Of the three principals, only Elaine May, as the wife, is well cast, but she is pitching in a game with no catchers. Peter Falk is too simian and heavy for the popinjay part of her wayward husband, and as a Jewish urban type, Jack Lemmon is frantic without being at all funny. Luv is too good a comedy to die this way; people who have never seen it will do better to find a road company of the play.