Who Was That Lady? *** (1960, Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, Janet Leigh) – Classic Movie Review 4547

Director George Sidney’s amusingly zany 1960 comedy is the fifth and last film together of husband and wife star team Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. It also stars Dean Martin as Michael Haney, and nowadays seems to be more marketable as a Dean Martin movie.

Curtis plays a Columbia University chemistry professor called David Wilson who claims to be an undercover spy in order to backtrack after his wife Ann (Leigh) spots him embracing one of his students in the science building, leading to interest from the FBI and real Soviet foreign agents (Larry Storch and Simon Oakland).

There is a lot of pleasure to be had from this entertaining, slapstick, madcap farce of the purest and most frantic variety, with Norman Krasna’s expertly funny screenplay based on his own successful 1958 Broadway play Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?

Curtis and Dean Martin make an amusing and appealing couple of best buddies, but Leigh as Curtis’s jealous wife is a slight disappointment, oddly so since she was his real-life wife at the time.

André Previn’s polished jazz score is an asset as are the glossy cinematography by Harry Stradling Sr, Jean Louis’s costume designs and the title song by Sammy Cahn.

Also in the cast are James Whitmore, John McIntire, Larry Keating, Barbara Nichols, Joi Lansing, Barbara Hines, Marion Javits, Mike Lane, Kam Ting, William Newell, Mark Allen, Sub Pollard, Joe Gray, Emil Sitka and Dyanne Thorne, while Jack Benny appears as himself..

Curtis and Leigh were married from 4 June 1951 till they were divorced on 14 September 1962, with two children, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis.

Leigh, McIntire and Oakland are all featured in the same year’s Psycho (1960).

The other four Curtis and Leigh films are: Houdini (1953), The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), The Vikings (1958) and The Perfect Furlough (1958).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4547

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