Cinema Therapy

Send Me No Flowers (1964)
Tonight Mon. Oct. 3; 6:30 PM
Fullerton Public Library
Directed By Norman Jewison
With Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall
Four Scoops of Bosco

Editor's Note: The Fullerton Public Library starts a series of films tonight that have one thing in common: They all had scenes shot in Fullerton. Scenes from this 1964 film were shot at the Fullerton Train Station. This is the review from 1964.

Do you suffer from splitting headaches? Is your stomach upset? Are you rundown? Does your husband complain of heart flutters and recurring dizzy spells? If so, before seeing a doctor, go to see "Send Me No Flowers," the new Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie that arrived yesterday at the Music Hall.

This is a pastime which, if taken in one submissive gulp, with maybe a dash of skepticism in a glass of leniency to wash it down, should do more to free the sluggish system of the poisons of hypochondria and set the old laugh organs humming than a medicine-cabinet full of pretty pills.

That seems to be the purpose of it—a sort of homeopathic remedy—to cause you so much pain laughing you forget your other ills. And once this has been accomplished, you should find those other ills have gone away, like the imaginary ills of the hero, which are the cause of all his anguish in this film.

He is a happily married fellow—and he should be, since he's married to Miss Day, who, for once, is a normal, happy housewife, undisturbed by ambition or sex. His only trouble is he has anxieties. He worries about his health. He dreams of imps pounding on his stomach the way they do in those TV diagrams.

One day he goes to his physician to check on an electrocardiogram and accidentally overhears the doctor taking a dire report on another patient over the phone. "Only two weeks to live?" says the doctor. "Well, poor fellow—I won't tell him; let him go as peaceably as possible"—or words to that effect.

Of course, our man leaps to the conclusion. Even though he is the picture of health—and, being Mr. Hudson, he looks the trademark of the Prudential insurance company—he goes forth "to face the great adventure" calmly, intelligently, courageously.

With the help of his friend and next-door neighbor—a willing drinker whom Tony Randall plays with a magnificent way of waxing maudlin—he sets about making sure his wife will be properly taken care of when he has—ahem—passed away. He makes his burial arrangements. Indeed, he lets himself be talked into buying a cemetery plot for three—himself, his wife and her second husband. And then he goes about trying to arrange, as tactfully and secretly as possible, to find his wife a second mate.

But, unfortunately, the fellow who turns up as a most likely candidate is one of his wife's old boy friends—a big, brassy, blustering, bruising bore. And the prospect of her passing on to this bird is enough to cause our man to give up planning to die.

It is a beautiful farce situation, and Julius Epstein has written it, from a play by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore, with nimble inventiveness and style. And Norman Jewison has directed so that it stays within bounds of good taste, is never cruel or insensitive, and makes something good of every gag.

Mr. Hudson plays the hero with the doggedness of a St. Bernard, immersing himself in self-pity, liberally blended with booze, and rising to noble indignation when he fears his passing won't be as genial as desired. Miss Day is full of puffs and splutters, initially at her husband's mystery and then, when she learns what is cooking, at his misplaced chivalry. And Mr. Randall is delicious as the ultra-sympathetic friend who insists upon the privilege of preparing and rehearsing the eulogy.

Paul Lynde is outrageously cheerful and commercially glib as the super-salesman of cemetery plots, and Edward Andrews portrays a physician you just know you can't trust. Clint Walker, the television cowboy (recent star of "Cheyenne"), does right well by the looming second husband, and several others are bright in lesser roles.

Perhaps there is a bit too much contrivance in the fashioning of the finish of this farce. But that's all right. It is still therapeutic. It should separate the hypochondriacs from the men.

On the stage at the Music Hall are the Hi-Lites, singers; Howard and Randall, a dancing team; Lucia Hawkins, singer, and the ballet company and Rockettes.


This review was originally written in November 1964 by Bosley Crowther
Mr. Crowther reviewed films for the New York Times