Send Me No Flowers (1964) - film review

George has everything a man could want.  A nice house, a good job and an adoring wife, Judy.  Yet every minute of his life is riddled with anxiety about his health.  Are his fears well-founded?  No, George is merely the world’s biggest hypochondriac.  He only has to hear about a rare life-threatening disease to convince himself that he has caught it.  Then, one day, his worst fears are confirmed.  In the course of a routine medical examination, he overhears a telephone conversation in which his doctor discusses the case of another man with a terminal condition.  Mistakenly assuming that the doctor is talking about him, George concludes that he has just a few weeks left to live.  His first concern is his wife so he immediately sets about trying to find a suitable husband for her to marry after he has passed away.  Fortunately, Judy’s former boyfriend, now an oil tycoon, chooses this moment to enter the frame, and George does everything he can to rekindle their former romance.  Judy soon becomes suspicious and deduces that George is doing this because he is having an extra-marital affair.  George’s best friend Arnold has a brilliant solution: if George confesses to seeing another woman, Judy will forgive him and welcome him back with open arms.  Clearly, Arnold does not know much about women...

The toast of Hollywood, Rock Hudson and Doris Day are brought together for their third and final screen pairing in this deliriously funny romantic comedy.  It may be less stylish than their first memorable encounter, Pillow Talk (1959), but the gags are more plentiful and generally much funnier.  Tony Randall ups the comedic ante and provides an amusing sidekick to Hudson, who is never funnier than he is here, playing the condemned man with unseemly gusto, extolling the virtues of furniture stroking and happily booking a cemetery plot for three.

Julius J. Epstein’s screenplay is witty and true-to-life, spiced up with some bizarre black humour, and Norman Jewison directs the film as it should be directed, as a lively, upbeat farce which is no more realistic than a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.   Hudson and Day spar off each other as if they genuinely had been married and you cannot help wondering why they didn’t go on to make several other films together.   Send Me No Flowers is a genuine comedy delight – and a far better medicine than those overpriced pep pills that merely clutter up the bathroom cabinet.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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