A few weeks ago, TCM aired a marathon of Garner's movies. I recorded a
few of them.

For some reason, I was in the mood to re-watch what I'd always
considered to be Garner's second worst movie, "Mister Buddwing". The
movie certainly has a lot going for it. It's adapted from an Evan Hunter
novel. Hunter was a very prolific novelist who wrote the 87th Precinct
novels as "Ed McBain" and used perhaps 20 other pseudonyms over his
lifetime. Hunter's books are readily adaptable for movies. He's also
written screenplays and teleplays.

Garner plays an amnesiac wandering through the streets of New York.
Through his encounters with four different women, he regains his memory.

Garner only knows that he's married but can't remember himself or his
wife. But the four women represent his wife at various points in their
relationship, an interesting conceit.

I like the scenes with the marvelous Angela Lansbury best. Two of the
others, Katharine Ross and Suzanne Pleshette, are ideal actresses to
cast opposite Garner, if only the scripts were better. In Garner's
flashback, Miss Ross plays his wife as the girl he met while she was
still in college and he was a struggling musician and composer (Garner
as an artist is amusingly against type). She's strangely meloncholy,
with no explanation. Miss Pleshette plays her as his even moodier wife,
desperate to have a child with Garner who is reluctant because as an
independent composer he's flat broke, but Pleshette doesn't want him to
take a job with a good future in which they could afford to raise the
child. Suddenly she makes her first suicide attempt; Garner prevents her
from jumping off one of the East River bridges.

Even emptier than the flashback scenes are the inexplicable current
scenes. Garner runs into a restaurant owner, the ingratiating Jack
Gilford who tries to convince Garner that his memory loss is actually a
denial of his Jewish heritage. Garner sees a newspaper headline about an
escaped insane criminal and thinks he might be him; oddly, he never
really thinks he might have killed his wife. He encounters a deranged
homeless man with a ghod complex who wants him as a disciple, and then
ends up dragged along as the trophy of a treasure hunt by Jean Simmons
who finds herself a forgotten man (well, at least forgetful) a la "My
Man Godfrey" playing an embittered Carole Lombard character, but
romantic comedy this ain't. In the flashback, Jean Simmons as his wife
is embittered, drunk, unfaithful, all as the result of aborting the
child. Garner has become successful but she hates him for it. Jean
Simmons drags amnesiac Garner to a high-stakes craps game in Harlem
where, in the game's excitement, Garner finally realizes that he lost
his memory because he couldn't cope with witnessing yet another suicide
attempt by his wife. The movie ends in a suburban hospital, Garner
talking to his wife in a coma; the audience never sees her face.

If only they had used that cast to produce a comedy, this could have
been a classic movie.

I also rewatched "They Only Kill Their Masters", another one of Garner's
lesser movies. I haven't seen this one in years. For some reason, I
remembered it was a better movie. The TCM host said Garner filmed it
while he was starring in "Nichols". Garner is re-teamed with Katharine
Ross.

Garner plays the police chief of a small, oceanside town in California.
The police department has no funding, can't even afford a sufficient
number of cars for the officers or even office equipment. In one of the
movie's few bits of amusing irony, Garner, the star of "Grand Prix" and
who would famously put Pontiac Firebirds through the best driving stunts
and most exciting car chases ever performed for a television series, is
forced to drive a barely running mid-60's Chevy used as a police cruiser
that has bald tires and can't get up to speed. Garner does not attempt
the Rockford Spin with this piece of dreck.

Again, the movie has a decent cast including Hal Holbrook, Harry
Guardino, June Allyson cast against type, Tom Ewell, Peter Lawford,
Edmond O'Brien, Arthur O'Connell, and Ann Rutherford.

The central mystery isn't bad and really should have been the basis of a
better movie. The trouble is that the movie extracts its humor through
utter contempt of the people in the small town, the worst possible
country bumpkins and hicks. The script is disjointed. We see the
murderer early in the movie with no lines; the murderer isn't an
important character until the motive is revealed! Who writes a mystery
like that? The dialogue in the romantic scenes with Katharine Ross is
unengaging but Garner can't help but be charming even if he's reading a
list of names from a telephone directory. At one point Garner realizes
that something he was told makes no sense and has an unpleasant, briefly
violent encounter with Miss Ross.

This would be the final movie filmed on MGM Back Lot Number 2, which
would be sold off for condos or something to pay MGM's debts. There was
no budget for movies in the early '70's because the audiences had
vanished. "They Only Kill Their Masters" had a budget like a made for tv
movie would have, but the low budget is not what makes it a bad movie.