> 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.