Just looking at the title of 1967’s Luv should give potential viewers an idea of bitter satire to be found within. It had me thinking of the intros to both The Shangri-La’s “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” and The New York Dolls’s “Lookin’ for a Kiss” which explicitly spell it that way. Given how abrasive the movie can be at times, I think they should have gone one step further and given it the far ickier spelling of W-U-V.
When the characters here aren’t in the saccharine-sweet (maybe even Stevia-sweet, God forbit) throes of “luv”, they are either suicidally depressed or filled with hate. Lemmon is the former, about to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge when former college classmate Peter Falk rides by on his moped. He stops, though initially only to get a lampshade out of the trash.
Then he notices Lemmon and invites the man home for dinner even when he hasn’t seen him in fifteen years. It is also suggested these two weren’t such great friends even back at the ol’ alma mater, an institution whose class song is inexplicably sung by all the patrons of the bar where the men stop for a drink along the way to Falk’s house. Lemmon’s tipple of choice is two-thirds water and one-third milk, which says a great deal about the man.
Falk claims to have become a great success, office clerk by day and seller of secondhand goods by night, hence the retrieval of that lampshade from the trash. He shows off to Lemon his gold watch and his silk underwear, the latter a moment where I don’t see how the actor could not have given himself a wedgie. Falk even shows off the French cologne he wears, encouraging the other man to smell his armpit.
Lemmon, on the other hand, has been a complete failure, a man of high expectations gone unfilled. Nicknamed “Dostoyevsky” in college, he went on to study with religious leaders in Tibet and Los Angeles. For those who don’t find the latter to the funny, or at least unusual, you’re probably not going to enjoy much of the material here. Similarly, you probably won’t be amused by the list of bad habits he has since undertaken, which include drinking, gambling and pot smoking, finally bottoming out with guitar lessons.
Still, Lemmon isn’t much impressed with Falk’s suburban home. Seeing how this nondescript block of real estate is the award for success, Lemmon tries to hang himself from the tree in the backyard. Falk intervenes, as he is desperate for wife Elaine May to meet a new man, any man, so she might finally decide to have a divorce and he can marry Nina Wayne.
When we meet May, I was wondering why she and Falk were even together at this point. Our introduction to this character has her displaying a graph charting the rapidly diminishing, and eventual cessation, of their rate of sexual intercourse. Having only previously seen the actress in her A New Leaf, in which she plays a mousy and rather clueless character, it was interesting to see her so filled with contempt here. I have always heard May is intimidating in person, and her silent expressions of rage here are astonishing. We’ll see some of these while Falk teases her hair and even puts on her makeup in preparation for dinner.
Dinner is not a success. One weird moment has what looks like two tramps casually entering the house, going into the basement and coming back up to present Falk an offer on a vase. So, this is his secondhand retail operation. Things weren’t going well even before this bizarre interruption, with May watching with increasing disgust and unease Lemmon’s twitchy, rabbity consumption of spaghetti. One the best laughs in the picture is when Lemmon discovers she also plays Flamenco guitar, and he leaps up from the table and does a dance around the room in that style. A jump cut show Falk and the two buyers in the basement looking upwards in befuddlement.
Myself, I was just confused by Falk’s wares, which include a lamp that is an arm holding the light bulb in its hand. Just try to trump that, leg lamp from A Christmas Story. And Falk is soon off to find more such merchandise (“There’s gold in the garbage cans of the city”), despite May’s pleas not be left alone with Lemmon.
An ensuring conversation between Falk’s “best classmate and my best wife” finds her expressing the Lemmon just how miserable she is over her romantic experiences. This is her wish on a star: “I wish I was a lesbian.” That line may not play well today for a reason, but I really wondered how it played back in 1967, when this was a very taboo subject. Keep in mind, John Waters had one of the plot elements of Pink Flamingos being lesbians adopting babies, because the idea was so infuriating to so many at the time. Different times, folks, different times.
May is forced to give him a ride home, yet they stop at an amusement park and seem to ride the merry-go-round all the way into the night. I was curious why they even went in, when all that preceded this was a fender bender close to the place, with the always-overdramatic Lemmon declaring, “I’m dying…I hear heavenly music.” May’s droll reaction is priceless, “It’s an amusement park”. Still, they go in and ride that merry-go-round until she convinces herself she is in love with this limp noodle of a man and she convinces him of the same when she forces him to cop a feel.
Falk is pleased she now wants a divorce, though he didn’t anticipate how much would go to her in the settlement. One example is the house, she’ll get it and he’ll get the mortgage. A great gag has him even selling to the peddlers the chair from his office of his day job, and he is forced to pretend he is sitting behind his desk all day. The payoff is Falk duckwalking everywhere, somehow even up the stairs to the shoddy apartment he now shared with Wayne.
Wayne isn’t given much to do in this, though there is a truly startlingly gross moment where we see her after she has done nothing in the first eight weeks of marriage to Falk except lay in bed and eat bon bons. I swear whatever the grey/gold stuff is they have smeared on her face has as its base either Vaseline or Crisco. I wanted to take a shower after just looking at her. Some guy may want to take a shower after seeing at other point in the movie for a different reason, and that is because she does have a seemingly impossible physique. I’m thinking of bras designed by bridge engineers. Also, a whole lotta lower back pain.
Needless to say, Falk starts souring on Wayne and is soon looking to reconcile with May. She is also looking to do the same, what with Lemmon unwilling to find a job. His character is named Harry Berlin and, rather inexplicably, he decides to make the basement into a lab in which he will develop the “Harry Berlin vaccine”. If that is prevent any more of himself in the world, then I’m all for it. Unfortunately, it is probably just another inoculation that will be banned by RFK, Jr. And Lemmon’s too frequent and too far over-the-top acting is finally put to good use in the one time we see him getting a job, that being an elevator operator so inept that is passengers are screaming for help. His conclusion: “Elevators are against the law of gravity. We’ll never make it to the moon.”
The humor is all over the place in this picture, a curious mix that never seems to decide whether it wants to be The Lockhorns, MAD Magazine or something far more sinister. For those who don’t get the first of those references, this movie will likely be too dated for it to be of interest to you. For those who wonder how dark the humor might get, the scene with the divorce settlement negotiations has Falk, Lemmon and May each wildly one-upping (or, one-downing, I guess) the others’ tales of childhood woe. My favorite was Falk saying he didn’t go to school until he was eight, because he didn’t have shoes until he had the good fortune of a kid in an apartment downstairs getting hit by an ice cream truck. May trumps them all with this conversation killer: “Have either of you ever been raped?”
May was a script doctor for most of her career, and I wondered if she provided that service for Luv, given the odd edge to some of the material. The most jarring scene has she and Lemmon atop Niagara Falls on their honeymoon, each forcing the other to prove how much they love them, by doing a progression of horrible things and asking afterwards if the other still loves them. These include her socking him hard in the gut and him tossing her beloved fur coat over the falls. This reminded me of the legendary (and, tellingly, unrecorded) improv she would do with partner Mike Nichols, in which a series of insults between them would escalate into actual physical violence until they would suddenly end it by merrily shouting “Pirandello!” This routine never failed to make audiences deeply uncomfortable and his movie likely caused a fair amount of unease for those who bothered to see it at the time. It was an unpopular film critically and commercially, and continues to be so to this day. Still, it is worth seeing for May’s performance in this odd and off-putting picture that I can’t imagine anybody ever claiming they loved, let alone “luvved”.
Dir: Clive Donner
Starring Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, Elaine May, Nina Wayne
Watched as part of Mill Creek’s blu-ray set Peter Falk 4-Film Comedy Collection