Coy little foreshocks of the coming sexual revolution rumbled through Hollywood when Camelot was in sway. One of them, Boys' Night Out, is a fitfully amusing sex comedy in which (it's of course understood) there is no sex.
Four flannel-suited soldiers of commerce commute from Connecticut to work in Manhattan; three of them Tony Randall, Howard Duff and Howard Morris have wives and families while the fourth, James Garner, is divorced. They stay in town every Thursday, their big night out which generally consists of their sitting around nursing beers because they can't think of anything better to do.
Fast forward: They pool their allowances to share the costs of a swank bachelor pad equipped with Kim Novak (who, out of her mauve phase, looks washed out in the bold 60s colors she sports). They divvy up the nights of the week to play playboys. But far from the full-service playmate they expect, Novak's doing post-graduate field work in sociology. (Her thesis: `Adolescent Fantasies Among Adult Suburban Males.') She manages to keep the evenings chaste and her research a secret by giving the guys what they really want: a chance to bitch about the job (Randall), to potter around fixing things (Duff), to eat the foods he's deprived of at home (Morris). Only Garner wants something more, because he's fallen for her.
No flies on the three wives, however, who hire a detective to find out what their husbands are really up to in town. At this point the movie devolves into full-tilt farce, pitifully lacking in laughs. But the whole thing is dispiriting. That love-nest, for instance, in all its garish bad taste, exposes a sheltered, Hugh-Hefnerish idea of luxurious decadence. And the lives that the men try to escape from, only to return to, seem bleached of any satisfaction: they get to cut loose only on the train shuttling them from their humdrum jobs to their humdrum wives (who, meanwhile, stay home dieting and drinking). Isn't it disingenuous, then, when the movie presents its neatly wrapped resolution everybody back home in the proper bed as if it were the happiest of endings in the happiest of all possible worlds?
Four flannel-suited soldiers of commerce commute from Connecticut to work in Manhattan; three of them Tony Randall, Howard Duff and Howard Morris have wives and families while the fourth, James Garner, is divorced. They stay in town every Thursday, their big night out which generally consists of their sitting around nursing beers because they can't think of anything better to do.
Fast forward: They pool their allowances to share the costs of a swank bachelor pad equipped with Kim Novak (who, out of her mauve phase, looks washed out in the bold 60s colors she sports). They divvy up the nights of the week to play playboys. But far from the full-service playmate they expect, Novak's doing post-graduate field work in sociology. (Her thesis: `Adolescent Fantasies Among Adult Suburban Males.') She manages to keep the evenings chaste and her research a secret by giving the guys what they really want: a chance to bitch about the job (Randall), to potter around fixing things (Duff), to eat the foods he's deprived of at home (Morris). Only Garner wants something more, because he's fallen for her.
No flies on the three wives, however, who hire a detective to find out what their husbands are really up to in town. At this point the movie devolves into full-tilt farce, pitifully lacking in laughs. But the whole thing is dispiriting. That love-nest, for instance, in all its garish bad taste, exposes a sheltered, Hugh-Hefnerish idea of luxurious decadence. And the lives that the men try to escape from, only to return to, seem bleached of any satisfaction: they get to cut loose only on the train shuttling them from their humdrum jobs to their humdrum wives (who, meanwhile, stay home dieting and drinking). Isn't it disingenuous, then, when the movie presents its neatly wrapped resolution everybody back home in the proper bed as if it were the happiest of endings in the happiest of all possible worlds?