Film review: Phffft! (1954)

Another Holliday-Lemmon collaboration, after It Should Happen to You, and while this one is less generically-named, it is on the whole inferior.  That's not to say it's not worth watching, because anything with those two would have to struggle hard not to be a good time, but ISHtY is easily our second fave Holliday after the incomparable Born Yesterday.  This one's interesting, though, in that Holliday is playing someone a lot more similar to the actual Judy Holliday than her usual untutored working girl-made-good.  In this one, she plays the writer of successful NBC soap operas, married at the start of the film to Jack Lemmon's tax lawyer.  I say "at the start," because almost the first event of the film is Holliday's Nina asking Lemmon's Bob for a divorce.  

This immediately leads to an argument about who thought of it first, as Bob insists he's been talking about it with his friend Charlie for some time.  The "Phffft!" of the title is how their divorce is referred to in the newspaper (apparently this came from Walter Winchell's habit).  We see Nina leaving the court in a bit of a daze, as her portly Southern lawyer waxes lyrical about how he always cries at divorces and this was a particularly good one.  Meanwhile, Bob moves in with the aforementioned Charlie (Jack Carson), 

a writer whom Bob has had to defend against plagiarism charges in the past, and who has all kinds of theories about romantic relationships and the correct ways to pursue them that he shares at various points in the proceedings.  He also introduces Bob to the system he has for each apartment-mate to communicate to the other that he does not wish to be disturbed: there is a light switch built into the wooden idol statue in the window that turns on the lightbulbs in its eyes, and then you swivel it so that it faces the street.  Bob doesn't think he'll need that, as he's sworn off the dames for the time being, and is happy to lie on the couch and take up the pulp novel he was reading at the start of the film 

that seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back for Nina, but Charlie is insistent that he get back out there, and calls up Janis, a great gal that he knows, who turns out to be Kim Novak in one of her very first film roles.  Janis is truly the quintessential dumb blonde, who is happy to do a cheerleader act at the bar she takes Bob to (where she is clearly very well-known).  

It's interesting to see Novak, who is better known as the icy cool object of Jimmy Stewart's obsessions in Vertigo throw herself so enthusiastically into a kind of less sympathetic Marilyn Monroe-in-Seven Year Itch performance, but she is not without comedic chops.  She seems inordinately hot-to-trot, even with the much older and unenthusiastic Bob (who is dumbfounded to find that she was once offered a scholarship to her small local university, until she reveals it was for being a majorette), and persuades him to take her back to the apartment.  "Aha," you think, "this is where we get to see the idol statue at work," and kudos, you're right, but it is Janis who immediately makes a beeline to it, turns it on and swivels it to face out the window.  As you can imagine, Bob's eyes bug out a little at this (a Jack Lemmon specialty).  Still, Bob can't go through with it, and Janis leaves, albeit fairly phlegmatically.  Meanwhile, when Nina arrives back on the set of her soap for the first time as a divorcée, her main actor immediately asks her out.  After a meal and an occasion to dance which she declines (because she and Bob had meant to learn the Rumba but never got round to it) he invites her back to his apartment.  She is nervous and he gives every impression of making a move... 

only to start talking about how she needs to re-write her scripts to focus more on him and have his "wife" (who is the title character) have an accident for a while.  As he's warming to his theme, he has his back to her on the bed and is gazing out of the window... only to see her escaping down his front steps.  "What'd I do?" he yells.  "You goofed!"

But neither Bob nor Nina is prepared to give up on love and throw themselves into self-improvement (which, of course, includes Rumba lessons).  Bob grows a mustache (one of Charlie's theories) and gets a sports car.  Nina's interfering interior decorating mother replaces her bed with a circular one (a move Bob had resisted in happier times because of the difficulty of getting round sheets and blankets), and after Bob's attempt to win Nina back (after they bump into each other putting their new rumba skills into action) 

by recreating the event that (as we saw in flashback) initially drew them together - his doing her taxes -

 fails (despite Nina's keenness for it to succeed) because he can't stop being judgmental of her expenses, Bob tries again with Janis and Nina is prepared to give Charlie a try.  (It is while this is happening that we hear Charlie explain about the two main camps of male approaches to win over women - the criers and the laughers ("there are of course subgroups - the whiners and the gigglers").  Is this the final end for Nina and Bob, despite the fact that they clearly still love each other?  Well, watch it and find out.