Friday’s film is Stuart Rosenberg’s romantic comedy, The April Fools (1969), starring Jack Lemmon, Peter Lawford, Myrna Loy, Charles Boyer — and the fabulous Catherine Deneuve. A stressed-out stockbroker runs off with his boss’s trophy wife…
Gosh. Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve in a romantic comedy, set in late 1960s Manhattan, or possibly Paris, with a soundtrack by Burt Bacharach! What more could one want? I mean, if a clever person said, ‘Luke, I want you to go away and think up the ultimate feel-good romantic comedy with a retro vibe’, I might come up with something along similar lines: Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve (‘Miss Deneuve’s jewellery by Cartier’), set in late 1960s Manhattan (including discothèques), with a soundtrack by Burt Bacharach (lyrics by Hal David), and a supporting cast including Peter Lawford, Myrna Loy and Charles Boyer. I mean, you couldn’t make it up. Plus a penthouse apartment stuffed to the ceilings with modern art and sculpture. The Seven Year Itch meets Austin Powers!
So I spent an enjoyable evening yesterday, sipping a vodka martini (straight up/stuffed olive) and watching The April Fools (1969) courtesy of Amazon Prime Video. But was it any good? Without giving too much away, the plot goes something like this. Jack Lemmon plays Howard Brubaker, a frazzled middle-aged, grey-suited stockbroker, trapped in the corporate system and a loveless marriage: clapboard, suburban Connecticut, a wife who’s more interested in doing up houses than doing her husband, and a weird, uncommunicative child. I adore Jack Lemmon. He’s one of my favourite Old School Hollywood stars. Lemmon’s great at these neurotic, stressed-out, buttoned-down Brooks Brothers commuting types: like Lemmon’s ambitious insurance executive in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) — a film we must return to at a later date. And all stressed-out neurotic execs need an equally neurotic and stressed-out lawyer (Jack Weston) to hector them and give them unsolicited advice.
So, Brubaker gets a promotion to ‘Head of the Investment Department’ and a swanky new executive office on Wall Street to go with it. By now you should know the score: black shelving, antiquarian leather bindings bought by the yard, ‘Tang’ dynasty horses, a serried stack of telephones on the power desk, three slanted fountain pens and one of those buzzer machine things connected directly to your desirable secretary’s desk, just outside your door: Bzzzzzz. “Mister Schiklgruber to see you, sir.” “Okay, Honey. Keep ‘em waiting for ten minutes, then send him right in.” And so, sunbed-smooth, womanising corporate boss, Ted Gunther (Peter Lawford), invites Brubaker to a party at the Gunthers’ penthouse. “C’mon. I’ve got some boootiful people I want you to meet.”
The Gunthers’ penthouse apartment/party scene is deeply amusing. Filmed, apparently, at the United Nations apartment complex at 860 UN Plaza, with production design by Richard Sylbert. It’s spectacularly vulgar. Not because of the decoration, especially — the all-white walls, black and white floor tiles, white shag pile carpets and cut-glass ashtrays, they’re okayish, sort of — or because of the hip and dubious guests, which include Susan Barrett singing ‘Say a Little Prayer’ over a white grand piano, but more because of the endless in-your-face trophy art statements. It’s like a roll-call of expensive 1960s artistic trendiness. And I had great fun spotting the pieces — the real deal: sculptures by Elisabeth Frink and Frank Gallo, Roy Lichtenstein and Victor Vasarely canvases — and if some genius can identify the kinetic armillary sphere at 1:17:59, I would be most grateful.
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