Eric266 There is something infectious about this comedy. The cast is about as perfect as you can get, but the subject matter was a bit awkward when compared to today's mores.Before Carrie Bradshaw there was Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie Wood) a real life psychologist and businesswoman (she was editor of Cosmo for 32 years). Ms. Brown has just written a very controversial book about sex and the single girl (hence the title). It creates a firestorm amongst her male colleagues and her conservative patients. Tony Curtis is Bob Weston, a writer for a sleazy National Enquire-esque magazine called Stop. Bob wants to get an interview with Ms. Brown, but pretends to be a patient in need of marital counseling as a ruse. He uses his next door neighbors', Frank (Henry Fonda) and Syvia (Lauren Becall), volatile marriage as material. Of course a romance blossoms and then the normal confusion and hijinks ensue.My issue with the film is the way Ms. Brown is portrayed. She is a befuddled, confused and weak female. She's also a terrible therapist. Despite writing a book on how a single girl can be successful, she immediately allows herself to become involved with a married patient. If I was the real Helen Brown, I would be appalled. Ms. Wood is gorgeous and I'm captivated by her screen presence, but she plays Ms. Brown as a woman who needs a man...the exact opposite of the book she wrote and my recollections of Ms. Brown in real life (mostly from reading her biography). I understand this was set in the 1964 when views of male/female relationship skewed more towards male dominance, but it was still hard for me to accept that Ms. Brown could accomplish so much while being so desperate for a man...and a married one at that. Her therapy techniques violate every code of ethics you can imagine. Sure, it was a funny movie and I enjoyed it, but it left me feeling awkward at how simple women were portrayed.The supporting cast is top notch and the movie's best selling point. Fonda and Bacall as the bickering neighbors are a treat. Mel Ferrer as Brown's fellow psychologist and potential love interest is hilariously smarmy and cocky. Fran Jeffries and Leslie Parish are attractive and funny love interests/secretary for Bob. Larry Storch appears in a cameo as a motorcycle cop during the finale's odd highway chase scene. Count Basie and his orchestra are here just to provide some gravitas, but don't really play any key roles.There is a running gag about Tony Curtis wearing a woman's robe and everyone referring to him as Mr. Lemon. Curtis and Jack Lemon had starred in "Some Like It Hot" a few years before where they dressed like women. The gag was funny the first two times, but it got overplayed.I have to say something about the chase scene. It seems that every romantic comedy in the 1960s had a chase scene. This one had a funny idea of the first three cars tossing a quarter to the toll taker. The last car leaves a dollar and takes the 75 cents. It was silly, poorly filmed, but made me laugh. Then there is another similar thing involving pretzels which I simply did not understand. I'm sure there was a point, but I missed it.With this much talent, it was going to succeed and it does. I just wish Ms. Brown had been played a bit more wisely and not as such an easy mark for Tony Curtis' Bob Weston.

bobvend The sixties sex comedy can be considered a genre into itself. This entry into that franchise holds lots of promise at the outset and includes some wonderfully ironic comedy slants and in-jokes. But the impostor/deception angle that propels the film has been done often before and much better. Soon the film seems to come off as merely a framework in which Fran Jefferies gets to warble and wiggle at predetermined intervals.It's no stretch for Tony Curtis to portray a sleazy writer for a bottom-of-the-barrel tabloid magazine; he inhabits the role well as this is familiar territory for him. Natalie Wood- who could fall face- first into a septic treatment plant and still emerge luminous- tries hard with her character. But I can't decide if this material is wrong for her, or is it the other way around. If for no other reason than perhaps they "owed someone a picture", Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda are inexplicably present to portray the bickering long-married neighbor couple. It's hard to imagine that either of these giants would be here by choice.And nothing clears up misunderstandings and solves problems like a good old car-chase scene! There's a right way (and a right reason) to shoehorn such a spectacle into a movie, but you won't find that here. The result is a juvenile, silly, and pointless finale. A running sight gag involving pretzels is the only ingredient that makes it even slightly amusing. They're crisp and salty and satisfying...everything this movie isn't. Too bad.

jkenny-2 Now I'm sorry I raced through this movie last night and told the DVR to go ahead and delete! I thought it was quite hilarious, in a screwball, self-referential, meta-fictional way! You've gotta love a film that continuously refers to how much Tony Curtis looks like Jack Lemon. I just never thought the studios allowed such tongue-in-cheek buffoonery on screen! Yes, Natalie Wood here is the most beautiful & desirable woman in the world. Henry Fonda does his gravitas routine to brilliant comic effect. Lauren Bacall is timeless & ageless in the role of a justifiably paranoid wife.I keep thinking: who was the wit who concocted such a script? Joseph Heller, the author of catch-22, one of the most highly-acclaimed novels of the 20th century. This film is amazingly & woefully under-appreciated!

bkoganbing I was reading in the Citadel Film Book Series The Films Of Lauren Bacall that the real Helen Gurley Brown was less than thrilled with the film made of her work which was a landmark in feminist literature. Turning it into a poor man's version of a Rock Hudson-Doris Day sex comedy she probably never envisioned.The Rock and Doris roles are taken by Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood. Tony plays a writer for a Confidential style magazine, today it would be the National Enquirer. He's already done articles debunking her credibility as far as being an expert on sex. Now Curtis proposes to publisher Edward Everett Horton to really get to know this person and embarks on a campaign to seduce the sex expert with all the cunning of Ashton Kutcher on the punk. But as what happens in all these films he actually falls for her.Of course it doesn't help that he gets in to see her pretending he's hosiery manufacturer and neighbor Henry Fonda and using his marital problems with Lauren Bacall as his entry to the pop psychologist's office. In this film Helen Gurley Brown is not the editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, but a Joyce Brothers type psychologist.I wish I could remember who said it, but I read a review of this film once where the reviewer said that the parts Fonda and Bacall played in cheaper productions years ago would have been played by Edgar Kennedy and Dot Farley. I should only have said something that brilliant. Watching Fonda I did see traces of the slow burn and Bacall is certainly more chic than Dot Farley. Nevertheless the way they bicker at each other could be the best thing about Sex And The Single Girl. Neither Fonda or Bacall is terribly proud of Sex And The Single Girl. I wonder what could have induced them to appear in this film?It's not the worst film that any of the leads or an exceptionally talented name cast of character players ever appeared in. Still these kind of films were being turned out regularly in the late Eisenhower- Kennedy years and this one dates real badly.Helen Gurley Brown's name and real contributions to feminism have stood the test of time better than this film has.