Good Neighbor Sam – 1964

Good Neighbor Sam (1964)

Secret identities and mistaken identities were part and parcel of many a classic era screwball film, and the 1964 Good Neighbor Sam featuring Jack Lemmon is a revival of the concept but with some aspects that could never have survived the Breen era of censorship.

Toiling as an under-utilized designer and copy man at an advertising agency, Lemmon's character of Sam Bissell comes up with a billboard idea that saves his employer from a very expensive loss of a client (Edward G Robinson) who demands not only "honest, clean" advertising but he wants it in his advertising company personnel, too. This means he goes to the trouble to investigate everyone he hires to promote his dairy and egg business, and it is only Lemmon that catches his eye as being morally qualified in this unique way.

Lemmon, who is actually on the verge of quitting his job out of frustration and a kind of suburban ennui that is only alleviated by his building of Rube Goldberg-style sculptures in his backyard and the affection of his wife Minerva (Dorothy Provine) and kids, has not only become confused at becoming the hero of the agency by keeping Robinson's advertising money in the company, but has inadvertently slid into a identity masquerade when his wife's best friend Janet (Romy Schneider) needs Lemmon to pretend to be her husband for a few days in order to meet the codicil requirements for inheriting $15 million from a recently deceased relative.

The three (Lemmon, Provine and Schneider) happen to all live next door to each other, and when a pair of competing relatives for the money (Linda Watkins and Charles Lane) send out a private investigator to snoop around with a "spy truck" that stays parked right in front of their houses day and night, hoping to spot something that could invalidate Janet to receive the $15 million dollars, Lemmon has to start sleeping overnight at his wife's friend's home to keep up the charade. The next day, Janet has to drive him into the city to his job where he is then spotted by his fellow employees, all but one who have never actually met his wife, and so conclude Janet is the real one, and then Nurdlinger himself appears, causing a panicked Sam and Janet to put on a display of happy marital kissing and embracing that convinces everyone that this is the "wholesome, clean American family" that Nurdlinger's company had always wanted on their team.

This is a difficult situation but the three conspirators are able to keep it going until Janet's estranged husband Howard (Mike Conners) shows up. He is soon added into the ruse, but to keep it going he has to start sleeping at Sam's house and pretending to be Mr. Bissell (fortunately, the Bissell children have temporarily left town with their grandmother). Meanwhile, Mrs. Bissell is starting to have metastasizing jealousy issues accompanied by Howard and she putting on their own "happily married couple" charade that cranks up the jealousy of Sam and Janet.

With these complications multiplying all around him, Sam stops paying attention to his job as a newly promoted high level advertising executive and he haphazardly approves a new billboard campaign for Nurdlinger that features giant photos of the "happily married couple" of he and Janet endorsing the cleanliness of Nurdlinger's products. With giant photos of them together all over the city, and the probate court hearing just a day away, Janet, Howard and Sam have to go out that night and deface all of the billboards so that their images can't be identified together, meanwhile Mrs. Bissell has declared she's had enough and is going to leave their "happy home."

Though the advertising that promoted the release of Good Neighbor Sam plays up the salaciousness of the situation, the film itself is in the vein of the manic 30's screwball comedies in which a complex problem gets only more complicated as small lies accumulate into crazier ones. Lemmon and Romy Schneider are the center of the film but it is really the plot's complications (which are kept clear and straight by director David Swift) and some of the running gags (a Hertz TV commercial that is being filmed on a sound stage that Lemmon seems to always be traversing through) are funny as we see these sub-stories advance in small snippets in between the bigger problem of Janet and Sam pretending to be married.

Good Neighbor Sam doesn't have the heart (or depth of satire) of the earlier advertising agency comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? of 1957, but Sam has it's own frenetic charm. Lemmon, Schneider and Provine work together as a three man comedy team quite well, but it doesn't last as the tale shifts eventually to a primary focus on Lemmon and Schneider, and that's probably what dampens the film's quality as it can never really get focused on it's subject, which is the divide between appearing to be "good, wholesome and clean" and secretly being quite the opposite, Sam being the former and the staff of advertising executives around him being the latter.

It is around this morality that Good Neighbor Sam doesn't really work very hard, which is probably what separates it the most from the 30's comedies it is aping. Any comedy film that clocks in at two hours and ten minutes obviously has a lot on it's mind, and there's plenty of threads left unexplored in the story that might have carried those ideas, whatever they were, and having Sam inadvertently ending up in a brothel at the stately Los Angeles' landmark Bradbury Building (used in so many other films and TV shows), with the ornate wrought-iron elevator lifting customers up into the upper floors where the prostitutes wait, a simple image of Victorian repression up against 1964 American morals (and maybe even the obsession with upper-mobility... see, using visuals as cues can get really attenuated fast) all of that just isn't made plain. Why do the principals go to such extremes to protect their reputations? Is it only about grabbing the $15 million dollars ($1 million of which is to come to Sam and Minerva) or is it about achieving marital happiness (something straight forward between Sam and Minerva, but rather weird between the always battling Janet and Howard). That's a lot to juggle once you start laying it all out for examination, and I suspect Good Neighbor Sam, doesn't really care, it just wants the jokes to land successfully, and for for the most part, they do.

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Original Page July 20, 2024 | Updated October 3, 2024