How to Commit Marriage

How to Commit Marriage
July 7, 1969
Naho Productions
Comedy, Musical
VHS
C+

While this has the potential to be as entertainingly bad as Gleason's Skidoo, although a more mainstream take on hippie culture, it never quite gets there.  I'm just guessing, but director Norman Panama probably didn't drop acid for research purposes, as Preminger did.  Not that this movie makes much more sense than Skidoo.  

As briefly as can I put it:  Bob Hope and Jane Wyman are going to tell their Berkeley-freshman-but-wholesome daughter played by the future TV Isis that they're getting a divorce, when she announces that she's engaged to Berkeley-senior-but-wholesome Tim Matheson (then spelling his last name Matthieson).  Like Frankie Avalon in I'll Take Sweden, he's an unemployed musician, but he composes classical.  Tim's father, Jackie Gleason, produces rock groups like the Comfortable Chair (as themselves) and is cynical about marriage and everything else.  The young folks' call off their wedding when Gleason reveals the truth about Isis's parents' marriage.  They decide to live together out of marriage, which leads to them joining the Comfortable Chair and becoming unwed parents.  Gleason bribes Prof. Irwin Corey, as a guru, to tell them to give up their baby for adoption.  Gleason's assistant, Paul Stewart (Raymond in Citizen Kane), is tricked by Hope and Wyman into thinking they're strangers, and Scottish, so they adopt the baby with seemingly no red tape.  Gleason gets suspicious, so he makes a chimp beat the golf pants off Hope.  Hope and Wyman meanwhile dress mod, bicker, and date Maureen Arthur and Leslie Nielsen respectively, but end up getting remarried in the end.  Isis and Tim get married, too, as do Gleason and Tina Louise.  Gleason and Hope, who've spent most of the movie exchanging unfunny insults, get caught in a mudslide a year later.  THE END.  No, there is no title song.

This is the last of my movies with Kenner G. Kemp, who was in Singin' the Rain among others; here he plays a race track extra.  Don Brodie, who plays Pevney, would be a gasoline attendant in Escape to Witch Mountain.