"A NEW KIND OF LOVE".......PAUL MEETS THE 3 FACES OF JOANNE........

A New Kind Of Love (1963)   Even in the most connect-the-dots tropes of 60's romantic comedies like this one, you can catch glimpses of the oncoming cultural/sexual revolution.........

                    Before the movie predictably arrives at a conclusion that's as Puritan and sanitized as a Sunday church sermon, it indulges in all the Hollywood fantasies about Paris.......in which the city's a sparkly, joyous Disneyland of romantic entanglements and rampant sex.

                    In many ways, though, this film's atypical of the usual rom-coms of the era.......in the casting of a couple who are way, way out of this movie's league and its lopsided structure.........(the plot's central gimmick doesn't kick in until halfway through the film....)

                     This was actually the husband-wife team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's second attempt at machine-tooled studio farce.......the first, 1958's "Rally 'Round The Flag,Boys" cast an uncomfortable Newman as a sexually frustrated suburbanite, daydreaming fantasies about his too pre-occupied house-wifey spouse, played by Woodward.

                     Five years later, "A New Kind Of Love" has Newman as a boozing, skirt-chasing, philandering,columnist, exiled to Paris for boffing his boss's wife. (This is practically the very same role he played back-to-back in the same year's  "The Prize"......as a boozing, skirt-chasing, philandering Nobel Prize winner...)

                     In what we consider deep, deep irony, Joanne Woodward, who won a 1958 Best Actress Oscar for playing a triple-split personality in "The Three Faces Of Eve", plays a designer of cheap knockoff dresses......and whom the script splits into three distinct personas......

                     When we first see her, she's almost trans-gendered as "Sam", so mannish that everyone mistakes her for a male, including Newman and later, a French hooker.....(who recoils in disgust and shock when she realizes she propositioned a woman........which leads us to believe that the filmmakers never ever encountered a French whore.....)

                      In reality, or the Hollywood version of it, underneath the exaggerated wardrobe of Sam is Samantha, really a sweetheart with a guarded heart, once terribly broken.....hence her preference for dressing as the hard-boiled Sam.

                      After the film eats up half its running time with parallel sequences of  Newman and Woodward's  Paris experience......(including an impromptu Maurice Chevalier concert)  the story engine revs up at long last.........and like all studio fake-sex romps, it hinges on deception, with one character pretending to be someone they're not....

                      Woodward, tired of living her life as 'Sam', submits to a series of punishing salon makeovers to transform herself into a platinum-wigged, high-heeled, dressed-to-the-nines maneater...........(in other words, a studio executive's idea of womanhood.....)

                       Spotting both Woodward and Newman at separate cafe tables, a clever con man scams Newman, claiming he's pimping an international call girl......he points to Woodward, outfitted in all her hooker finery. When the suckered Newman accosts Woodward, hoping she'll inspire a racy column, she decides to play along......spinning ridiculous stories of her sexual conquests, mostly copied from old novels.

                     Here, at last , is where the film, in true 1960's rom-com tradition, goes into high gear.....with make-believe sleaze designed to hide the fact that there's no real sex at all going on here.  Newman turns Woodward's fictitious bedroom exploits into dumbbell double-entendre news stories that equate her tall tales of epic screwing with bicycle racing and soccer.

                    Newman's columns (which of course, freshly endear him to his cuckolded boss) get visually depicted in the same clumsy style of the 'Rally Round The Flag, Boys' fantasies that Newman dreamed up when Woodward played his wife.......

                    Nobody need worry about the ongoing faux-immorality of all this........once the deception's revealed, our prickly couple, who've stumbled into love with each other, as you knew they would,  express the proper Hollywood levels of outrage, shame and embarrassment.

                   Even with all the standard stuff, the film stands apart, what with its extra high-class romantic duo, clearly slumming compared to their usual fare.and the wobbly construction of the plot.

                 But there's more than enough to enjoy........Thelma Ritter and Marvin Kaplan as sideckicks to each of the leads, and each supplied with a steady stream of one-liners.......and a split-screen sequence comparing models to strippers that keeps going long after it makes its satirical point......(not that we minded all that much....)

                   2 stars (**) for a something of a rom-com oddity. The catchy title song, warbled by no less than Sinatra, will stay in your head far longer than the movie........