The Man Who Understood Women

(20th Century-Fox). In a sneak preview of this film at a Manhattan movie theater, a woman in the roped-off guest section raised her voice in the dark to cry: "Good heavens, how could Hank have accepted such a role?" There on the screen, prancing awkwardly in mandarin robes, flamenco suits, a clown costume, a silly goatee, was Henry Fonda in the role of Willie Bauche, Hollywood producer-director-writer-actor and the most elaborate phony since the big bad wolf.

Another question is in order. How could a smoothly expert screenwriter like Nunnally Johnson (The Desert Fox, The Three Faces of Eve) have wrung so much carbonated pap out of a skillfully written Romain Gary novel? "Marriage is the last frontier," says Fonda. "Few men face it without remembering what happened to Dr. Livingstone." With that he proposes to an aspiring star (Leslie Caron), whose name he soon writes in the Hollywood sky. They marry, but he is too busy merchandising his wife's soul to give husbandly attention to her body; as their marriage nears its third or fourth anniversary, it remains unconsummated. "There were times," muses Fonda's personal pressagent (Myron McCormick), "when the great man showed less judgment than any man in the history of the theater, with the possible exception of John Wilkes Booth."

After about an hour of this, the scene shifts to the French Riviera, where the unattended wife meets a tall, straightforward French soldier (Cesare Danova). In his wallet is a seminude picture of her, clipped from a fan magazine; he has carried it from the 38th Parallel to Dienbienphu. He shows it to her and confesses his secret love. She bares her arid heart. They bolt to his clifftop villa.

Fighting back, Fonda hires assassins, one of whom kills the other. He also fends off a blackmailer who wants enough money to live for three days like an American tourist. Thus the film alternates between unsuccessful farce and success-formula soap opera, but it never quite lives up to its pressagentry as "twists of tender pathos sublimated by laughter before the pathos can descend to bathos." The Man Who Understood Women is bathos cubed.

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