Here is a comedy made with great goodwill, but it seems old-fashioned. Perhaps films like "The Graduate" have influenced our requirements for comedy. It is no longer enough to be amused. We also want to be grabbed by comedy in the same way drama does. We want to be forced to react, to laugh at ourselves occasionally.
"How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life" avoids operating on these interesting levels. It's a comedy of the 1940s and 1950s sort, produced by a master of that older style, Stanley Shapiro, whose big hit was "Pillow Talk" (1959). Like that one, it has two main ingredients. First, there's got to be a mildly daring social issue to tickle the audience, but not too much. This time, it's whether mistresses should have legal rights like wives. So Dean Martin tries to save his buddy (Eli Wallach) from an unfaithful mistress (Anne Jackson). But he gets his signals crossed and thinks Wallach's mistress is Stella Stevens. By the time he realizes his mistake, he's stuck with the wrong mistress.
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