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The Art of Love
During the third season hiatus from his classic CBS sitcom, Dick Van Dyke and the show's creator Carl Reiner somehow found time to collaborate on a hysterically funny 1965 comedy called The Art of Love that provides fall-down-on-the-floor hysterics as long as you don't think about it.
Van Dyke plays Paul Sloan, a starving painter living in Paris with his best friend Casey Barnett (James Garner), a struggling writer who decide to fake Paul's death in order to sell his work because Paul has been advised by a local art deal that artists' work sells much quicker after the artist passes away. Casey decides to stash Paul on the top floor of a nightclub owned by the brassy Madame CoCo (Ethel Merman) where he will continue to paint, but then Casey gets greedy and forgets about Paul, only lining his own pockets.
Paul and Casey's plan gets complicated by a young French woman named Nikki (Elke Sommar) who Paul met during his alleged suicide who falls instantly in love with him and Paul's fiancee, Laurie (Angie Dickinson), who arrives from the States when she hears from Paul's death, but ends up falling for Casey. Things get even stickier for our boys when the police investigating Paul's suicide come to the conclusion that it was not a suicide and that Casey murdered Paul.
Carl Reiner has concocted an outrageously over the top funny story perfectly suited to the stars and lovingly brought to fruition by veteran director Norman Jewison who displays a real gift for slapstick comedy here that rivals his work on another Carl Reiner screenplay The Thrill of it All. There are a couple of small plot points that it was hard to get past, primarily the fact that no one involved in this story seemed to question the fact that Paul's work kept showing up despite the guy had supposedly killed himself.
I was also a little troubled by the fact that even though this story took place in Paris that this film looked like it never left a Hollywood soundstage. Taking place in Paris, a lot of the supporting characters are French, but they're all played by American actors. I think this movie would have been even funnier with an actual French supporting cast. These nitpicks took a half bag of popcorn off my rating, but they never got in the way of the laughs provided on the surface of the story.
Van Dyke and Garner are absolutely hilarious in their physically demanding roles, documenting their affinity for physical comedy. Van Dyke even gets to briefly reprise his elder Mr. Dawes character from [i]Mary Poppins[/I. ]Sommar and Dickinson were attractive leading ladies and there is standout support from Roger C. Carmel as the art dealer who springboards the whole plot and the glorious cameo by Reiner as Garner's lawyer. For a movie that's over 50 years old, this one still brings the funny, thanks primarily to comic legends Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner.
During the third season hiatus from his classic CBS sitcom, Dick Van Dyke and the show's creator Carl Reiner somehow found time to collaborate on a hysterically funny 1965 comedy called The Art of Love that provides fall-down-on-the-floor hysterics as long as you don't think about it.
Van Dyke plays Paul Sloan, a starving painter living in Paris with his best friend Casey Barnett (James Garner), a struggling writer who decide to fake Paul's death in order to sell his work because Paul has been advised by a local art deal that artists' work sells much quicker after the artist passes away. Casey decides to stash Paul on the top floor of a nightclub owned by the brassy Madame CoCo (Ethel Merman) where he will continue to paint, but then Casey gets greedy and forgets about Paul, only lining his own pockets.
Paul and Casey's plan gets complicated by a young French woman named Nikki (Elke Sommar) who Paul met during his alleged suicide who falls instantly in love with him and Paul's fiancee, Laurie (Angie Dickinson), who arrives from the States when she hears from Paul's death, but ends up falling for Casey. Things get even stickier for our boys when the police investigating Paul's suicide come to the conclusion that it was not a suicide and that Casey murdered Paul.
Carl Reiner has concocted an outrageously over the top funny story perfectly suited to the stars and lovingly brought to fruition by veteran director Norman Jewison who displays a real gift for slapstick comedy here that rivals his work on another Carl Reiner screenplay The Thrill of it All. There are a couple of small plot points that it was hard to get past, primarily the fact that no one involved in this story seemed to question the fact that Paul's work kept showing up despite the guy had supposedly killed himself.
I was also a little troubled by the fact that even though this story took place in Paris that this film looked like it never left a Hollywood soundstage. Taking place in Paris, a lot of the supporting characters are French, but they're all played by American actors. I think this movie would have been even funnier with an actual French supporting cast. These nitpicks took a half bag of popcorn off my rating, but they never got in the way of the laughs provided on the surface of the story.
Van Dyke and Garner are absolutely hilarious in their physically demanding roles, documenting their affinity for physical comedy. Van Dyke even gets to briefly reprise his elder Mr. Dawes character from [i]Mary Poppins[/I. ]Sommar and Dickinson were attractive leading ladies and there is standout support from Roger C. Carmel as the art dealer who springboards the whole plot and the glorious cameo by Reiner as Garner's lawyer. For a movie that's over 50 years old, this one still brings the funny, thanks primarily to comic legends Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner.