AS SEEN ON THE UNIVERSAL TRAM TOUR..............."THE ART OF LOVE"......

The Art Of Love (1965)    Major movie studios began their slow-motion crumble in the tumultuous 1960's.........

            And it got worse for them in the 70's, after their bloated, out-of-touch 3 hour musicals and epics sank like stones..........leaving only a froth of red ink in their wake........

             But Universal studios found their own peculiar formula in the 60's...........to crank out movies that looked and sounded no different than the packaged sausage that rolled off their TV production assembly lines.......

             .........even cooler, you could watch all this cinematic Spam being filmed if you took the tourist trams that rolled through the studio's backlot......

              This one, a frantic, wheezing farce written by TV comedy maestro Carl Reiner, unfolds on backlot Paris.........the sets will remind you of the quaint 'Euro-world' streets you now can stroll through in theme parks everywhere. 

              In this make-believe Paree, we find struggling creative expatriates Dick Van Dyke, a failed artist and James Garner, a failed writer.

               Van Dyke ends up faking his own suicide to increase the value of his paintings......the amorous Garner takes advantage of this situation by romancing Van Dyke's grief-stricken American fiancee (Angie Dickinson).  Van Dyke, while fending off the romantic interest of a fellow failed-suicide (Elke Sommer) conspires, in revenge, to frame Garner as Van Dyke's murderer.........

               Uh.......did you get all that?

               Van Dyke mollifies Sommer, who's outraged at his frame-up scheme, by promising he'll re-appear in public to rescue Garner from the guillotine........just before the blade comes down on Garner's neck.  (At one  point, he pops up at Garner's murder trial, disguised in his Disney costume as Dawes, the ancient banker he played in"Mary Poppins" and "Mary Poppins Returns"......)

               And yes, it's performed by the cast as exhausting, ludicrous and cartoonish as it sounds....without so much as a drop of comedy in it......or anything resembling human behavior...(and deepest sympathies to Angie Dickinson, forced to faint dead away in every scene she's in.....the movie's idea of a running gag...)

               Contributing to the sheer noise level:  Broadway composer Cy Coleman, who scores the film as if it's one long high-decibel overture to one of his shows........relentless and never-ending.
And the braying Broadway diva Ethel Merman competes with him in volume......but mercifully, only in a small supporting role.......

                 Everybody here went on to much, much better things.......especially its director, the future A-lister Norman Jewison.  And I'd like to believe that they remembered to stop what they were doing and wave happily to the tourists on the Universal Studios tram cars....

                  It's not like the tram tours were interrupting anything important......2 stars (**) for the hardworking cast.......and those lovely theme park streets.