Blake Edwards's The Perfect Furlough (1958)

I'm not going to be defending Blake Edwards any longer, except for the brilliantly funny The Party (1968).  The best I can say about The Perfect Furlough is that I would have loved it if I had seen it when it came out; I was twelve years old at the time and not allowed to go to the movies unless my parents took me, which they were never interested in doing.  I was just saying to my children recently that comedy is more effective in black-and- white (we just finished watching the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show) because of the distraction from the physical and verbal humor in color.  Even if one concedes the beautiful mise-en-scene of many of Edwards's films it is still a distraction from what humor there is.  Also, Edwards's comedies do not transcend their time, as true of 10 (1979) as it is of The Perfect Furlough, which, with its back projection and backlot Paris seems more like an episode of the Phil Silvers show than a movie, as Cpl. Paul Hodges (Tony Curtis) manages to fix the lottery that rewards one soldier above the Arctic Circle a three-week furlough in Paris with sexy movie star Sandra Roca (Linda Cristal).

Accompanying Curtis on his furlough are army psychologist Lt. Vicki Loren(Janet Leigh) and public relations expert Liz Baker (Elaine Stritch, superb in her few scenes); their job is to make sure Curtis and Cristal don't engage in sex with each other.  Curtis sneaks out on his chaperones only to find out that Cristal is secretly married, though when it is discovered that she is pregnant the blame goes to Curtis, with whom Leigh falls in love when she falls into a wine-making vat.

The screenplay of The Perfect Furlough is written by Stanley Shapiro, who also wrote such dubious and dated films as Lover Come Back (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962) and the unnecessary and intrusive wide-screen and color cinematography is by the usually reliable Philip Lathrop. A comedy doesn't have to be funny, as I have said many times, but it does have to say something other than that isolated soldiers get "restless."