Send Me No Flowers - 1964

Send Me No Flowers - 1964:Rock Hudson plays a high-achieving hypochondriac who mistakenly overhears his doctor discussing a patient with only a few weeks to live before"their ticker" gives out. He anxiously assumes the diagnosis applies to him, returns home to his wife (Doris Day), and begins getting his affairs in order—confiding the grim news only to his next-door neighbor (Tony Randall). Out of concern for his wife’s future, he sets out to find her an acceptable new husband "so she won't be lonely" but she misinterprets this as an attempt to push her aside in order to pursue affairs with other women in their gossip-ridden neighborhood. Meanwhile, Tony Randall begins drafting a grand, heroic eulogy for his best friend's eventual funeral, fueled by an endless supply of alcohol to dull the sorrow of his impending loss.

What could have easily been a black comedy about death never quite covers the ground necessary to become one. Instead, it is so caught up in silliness and gags of every variety that it seems unwilling to approach the very subject it aims to satirize (script by Julius J. Epstein, Norman Barasch, and Carroll Moore). One exception 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," Even so, this, too, veers into silliness without ever striking a deeper note.

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 the perfect sidekick to Hudson and his secret. He’s on screen either drunk or in the process of getting there, and notably, he’s not the neurotic nebbish seen in some of his other roles. Edward Andrews appears as the exasperated doctor, lamenting how medical specialists get all the breaks and the big money in the lucrative side of the healthcare industry. There’s also a clever running gag about his attempts to give away fish from a successful weekend excursion—yet no one wants any. In a way, the unwanted fish he carries becomes a metaphor for the film’s true subject: death. And just like the fish, nobody wants to touch it.

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