Illicit and How to Murder Your Wife

He had done nothing exceptional in marrying -- nothing but what society sanctions, and considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Turner Classic Movies showed two movies about marriage recently:  Archie Mayo's Illicit from 1931 and Richard Quine's How to Murder Your Wife from 1965.  In the Quine it is the man who doesn't want to get married and give up his Playboy lifestyle, while in Mayo's film Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman who doesn't want to get married because it would lead to a life of ceremony and tedium.  In How to Murder Your Wife Jack Lemmon gets drunk and marries the sexy Virna Lisi, who pops out of a cake at a bachelor party where the bachelor doesn't get married (Lemmon had slept with his girlfriend the night before!).  Lisi, of course, does not even speak enough English to understand that Lemmon wants a divorce and does his bachelor pad over with chintz and takes over the bathroom to wash her stockings.  In Illicit Stanwyck marries because of social pressures and lives to regret it, her husband having an affair with her best friend.

The Quine film (written by George Axelrod, who wrote The Seven-Year Itch) is a mostly unfunny and rather sour comedy -- Quine's best film having been Pushover (1954), a film noir -- and it is hard to tell if How to Murder Your Wife is endorsing or satirizing Playboy, with Lemmon's closest friend being his butler, played by Terry-Thomas, with homoerotic qualities.  Illicit transcends its time more effectively(at least in part, of course, because it is a pre-code film), with Barbara Stanwyck preferring just to live together, asserting her independence when all her concerns about marriage turn out to be justified.  In Quine's film the marriage is considerably less equal, with Lemmon finally yielding to Lisi because, after all, she is so sexy.