This is the trailer for The Guide for the Married Man, a 1967 movie that turns up often on cable. Back in an earlier posting here, I had this to say about its DVD release…
I'm kind of amazed that they're releasing A Guide for the Married Man since ever since I first got a satellite dish, there have been few moments when it wasn't playing on some station. For a time there, I thought DirecTV had added the All-A Guide for the Married Man-Channel to my lineup, somewhere between the channel that's all M*A*S*H reruns and the one that seems to alternate between showing Hello, Dolly and the equally-entertaining Ron Popeil infomercial for the steak knives. Guide is an odd film. Everyone in it's great, especially Walter Matthau and Robert Morse. There are cameos (briefer than the advertising would have you believe) from Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar and others in that category of performer that is becoming sadly extinct. There are great looking women. There's a bouncy theme song by The Turtles. The film even has a scene where Joey Bishop is very funny, and how often does that happen?
So what's wrong with it? Well, it's one of those sixties' comedies built on the premise that cheating on one's mate is a fun, acceptable and even (in this case) noble thing for one to do. Even if you buy that philosophy, that aspect of the film seems so shallow and sitcom-silly that it's hard to enjoy. If you can get past that, you might. (Two other interesting things about the film: It was directed by Gene Kelly, and you can hear his voice pop up occasionally on a TV set or otherwise off-camera. And he originally wanted to have Matthau and Morse play each other's parts. Matthau kept declining the project until one day when he was telling Billy Wilder about this film he'd been turning down, and Wilder said, "Hey, that would work if you guys switched parts." Matthau decided he was right and said he'd do the picture if they swapped, and the studio agreed.)
Those who live in Los Angeles may get an extra jolly in that the movie was shot all over 1967 Los Angeles, but especially around Century City. Art Carney plays a construction worker…and the structure his crew is putting up soon became that big office building on the southwest corner of Avenue of the Stars and Santa Monica Boulevards. The scenes in the supermarket were filmed in what is now the Gelson's in what is now the Westfield Century City Mall, and there are scenes around the mall itself as it then looked. There are even moments in a tiny amusement park called Ponyland which was then located at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega. It was a little rat-trap with cotton candy that seemed to exist only for divorced fathers to have a place to take their kids on the weekend when they had custody. Around 1980, it and some surrounding oil wells were torn down, and the Beverly Center was built on that land. Anyway, if you buy this film and you're bored by what the actors are saying and doing, keep an eye on the backgrounds.
Anyway, here's the trailer. You can see a few seconds of Matthau and Morse in the amusement park I mentioned — the one located on the ground where the Beverly Center is now situated…
