"The Notorious Landlady" exemplifies how all the right ingredients can add up to a failed movie. Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, and Fred Astaire are megawatt stars. The look of the film is great; high quality, deeply textured black and white film stock records interesting, early sixties sets. The direction is the weak point. The film never comes together. It badly needs to be edited; it should be at least 25 percent shorter. Much of the humor is derived from extended dirty jokes about Kim Novak's spectacular figure. Jack Lemmon leers and gawks and cops feels. Yuch, not yuck. Even Fred Astaire steals a kiss. Sad, undignified, and not funny.
The movie is clunky, awkward, and badly pieced together. Parts are leering dirty joke, parts are murder mystery and courtroom drama, parts are attempts at broad humor, and other parts are painfully bad romantic comedy. Jack Lemmon comes across as a very creepy, overbearing, almost stalker-like tenant. At one point he shoots the lock off of his landlady's bathroom and walks in on her as she is bathing. The audience that will find this scene appealing is, one would hope, very small, and certainly deranged and unaware of appropriate courtship behaviors.
Sadly, according to IMDb comments, the director, Richard Quine, killed himself because he lacked the skill to make frothy romantic comedies. One can only shake one's head at the irony of that.
The movie is clunky, awkward, and badly pieced together. Parts are leering dirty joke, parts are murder mystery and courtroom drama, parts are attempts at broad humor, and other parts are painfully bad romantic comedy. Jack Lemmon comes across as a very creepy, overbearing, almost stalker-like tenant. At one point he shoots the lock off of his landlady's bathroom and walks in on her as she is bathing. The audience that will find this scene appealing is, one would hope, very small, and certainly deranged and unaware of appropriate courtship behaviors.
Sadly, according to IMDb comments, the director, Richard Quine, killed himself because he lacked the skill to make frothy romantic comedies. One can only shake one's head at the irony of that.