Send Me No Flowers - 1964

Send Me No Flowers - 1964: Rock Hudson is a high-achieving hypochondriac who mistakenly hears his doctor referring to someone with only a few weeks to live before "their ticker" gives out, and he nervously applies the diagnoses to himself, goes home to his wife (Doris Day) and starts to get his affairs in order, confiding the dark news only to his next door neighbor (Tony Randall) about his impending doom. Out of concern for his wife he determines to set her up with an acceptable replacement "so she won't be lonely" but she mistakes this as an effort to push her out of the way so he can carry on romantic pursuits with other women in their gossip-soaked local area. Meanwhile, Tony Randall starts writing a rough draft of an heroic eulogy for the eventual funeral, fueled by an endless supply of alcohol to nurse his sadness over the coming death of his best friend.

What could have easily been a black comedy about death never really covers the ground necessary to do so, and is instead so wrapped up in silliness and gags of every variety that it seems to simply not dare to get near the actual thing it is satirizing (script by Julius J. Epstein, Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore). One acception is the jubilant, smiling Paul Lynde as an energetic undertaker selling burial plots "for the whole family" in a place called Green Hills "truly a home away from home," though this too is pretty silly stuff without any deeper notes.

Within its own narrow perimeters Bring Me No Flowers is as polished and as tight a comedy as Rock Hudson ever got to make, and he dominates this film in a way he never got to do in the other two films he made with Doris Day (Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back) and gives a very good and funny performance amid the frothy silliness (and gets off a wonderfully self-aware crack about wishing he could set up his soon-to-be-widow with Cary Grant.)

Tony Randall is a perfect sidekick to Hudson and his secret, is on screen as continually drunk or in the process of getting there and isn't the neurotic nebbish of other films. Edward Andrews appears as the aggravated doctor who complains how medical specialists get all the breaks and the high-end money in the wealth-generating part of the medicine industry, and there is a nice running joke about his trying to get rid of some of the fish he catches on a productive weekend excursion, but nobody wants any: in a way the dead fish he is carrying around is a metaphor for the actual topic of death, and in the case of this film, nobody wants to touch it.

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