Okay, here are The Turtles on a 1967 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour performing one of their hits…the title song to the 1967 comedy film, The Guide for the Married Man. Let's watch it and talk about it…
They're lip-syncing to the record but I believe they removed the vocals by the lead singer, Howard Kaylan, and had him redo his track. Variety shows often did that. They'd use the recorded track but alter something so it didn't sound exactly like the record. But let's talk about the movie. Here's some of what I wrote before here about it…
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. 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 and it 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.
I just love this song. It was composed by John Williams, long before Star Wars and long before he succeeded Arthur Fiedler as the Boston Pops Orchestra's Principal Conductor. And did you know that Williams has more Academy Award nominations than anyone except Walt Disney?
Anyway, the lyrics were by Leslie Bricusse, soon after he wrote the words for the title tune of Goldfinger and at about the same time as he was writing lyrics for Dr. Dolittle. Mr. Bricusse passed away last week. Here's a piece over on Playbill about his quite substantial contributions to the musical theater.
So Bricusse and Williams wrote the song. The Turtles just sang it and it's just so bouncy and silly and sixties.
When I edited my mixtape, I accidentally put this song on twice. When I realized my mistake, I didn't fix it. I wanted to hear this song twice as often as I heard any of the others.