Sex and the Single Girl movie storyline. Bob Weston is the top reporter for a sleazy, but highly profitable, tabloid magazine that owes its success to stories highlighting sex. Helen Gurley Brown is a bright and beautiful 23 year old psychologist who has authored the best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl.”
Weston realizes that Brown won’t grant him an interview because she has already been the subject of one of his exploitative articles. So he masquerades as his friend and neighbor Frank Broderick, a hosiery manufacturer henpecked by a jealous wife. After several counseling sessions as a patient with the attractive Dr. Brown complications arise when the womanizing writer starts to fall in love with the psychologist.
Sex and the Single Girl is a 1964 American Technicolor comedy film directed by Richard Quine and starring Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Mel Ferrer, Fran Jeffries, Leslie Parrish, Edward Everett Horton, Larry Storch, Helen Kleeb, Howard St. John and Otto Kruger, in Panavision. The film was inspired by the non-fiction book Sex and the Single Girl (1962) by Helen Gurley Brown.
The film was a box-office hit and one of the top 20 highest-grossing films of 1964. But Tom Milne in the Time Out Film Guide 2009 describes the film as a “[c]oyly leering comedy… graceless stuff, criminally wasting Bacall and Fonda as a couple with marital problems…with Quine’s moderate flair for comedy nowhere in evidence” and with “noise substituting for wit and style” according to Halliwell’s Film & Video Guide.
About the Story
Bob Weston (Tony Curtis) works for STOP, a scandal magazine whose owner and staff are proud of being regarded as the filthiest rag in America. One of Bob’s colleagues has just written an article about Dr. Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie Wood), a young psychologist and author of the best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl, a self-help guide with advice to single women on how to deal with men. The article raises doubts on her experience with sex and relationships. Helen is very offended, having lost six appointments with patients due to the article discrediting her as a “23-year-old virgin.” Bob wants to follow up by interviewing her, but she refuses.
Bob’s friend and neighbor, stocking manufacturer Frank Broderick (Henry Fonda), is having marriage issues with his strong-willed wife Sylvia (Lauren Bacall), but can’t find the time to go to a counselor. Therefore, Bob decides to impersonate Frank and go to Helen as a patient, with the goal of getting close to her in order to gather more information. Meanwhile, he’ll report back to Frank on her advice.
During their first couple of sessions, Bob acts shy and smitten, and tries to gently seduce Helen. She seems to respond to Bob’s courteous advances, all while insisting that it’s a transfer and that she’ll play the role of Sylvia to the benefit of his therapy. After he fakes a suicide attempt, the two of them end up making out in her apartment, with Bob realizing he’s actually falling for Helen, which is the reason he still has not written anything about her, prompting an ultimatum from his boss.
Helen panics at the idea that she’s in turn falling for a married man, and upon suggestion from her mother, she meets Sylvia and tells her to go back to work at Frank’s office, where the two of them first met and could stand together against Frank’s business rivals. Sylvia had initially rejected that suggestion coming from Frank (who had heard it from Bob), but she ultimately decides to follow the advice, thus reconciling with her husband.
A terminally lovestruck Bob forces another meeting with Helen and tries to convince her his marriage isn’t legal, but Helen insists on hearing it from his wife and secretly asks her to come to her office. In the meantime, Bob asks his girlfriend, night club singer Gretchen (Fran Jeffries), to pose as his wife (or rather, Frank Broderick’s wife), and when she cancels at the last minute because of an audition, he asks his secretary Susan (Leslie Parrish) to go instead. Without telling him, Gretchen decides to forgo her audition, so she also shows up at Helen’s office. Witnessing three different women claiming to be Mrs. Broderick, Helen gets extremely confused, while a furious Sylvia calls the police on Frank, who is then arrested for bigamy.
Helen comes to visit Sylvia with fellow psychiatrist Rudy DeMeyer (Mel Ferrer), who has had a crush ever since the article intimated she might be a virgin. In trying to convince Sylvia to pardon Frank, she finally finds out the man who’s been coming to her studio was not Frank Broderick at all, but rather STOP Magazine’s managing editor Bob Weston. Shocked, she asks Rudy to take her to Fiji.
Sex and the Single Girl (1964)
Directed by: Richard Quine
Starring: Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Mel Ferrer, Fran Jeffries, Leslie Parrish, Edward Everett Horton, Larry Storch, Helen Kleeb, Howard St. John, Otto Kruger
Screenplay by: Joseph Hoffman
Production Design by:
Cinematography by: Charles Lang
Film Editing by: David Wages
Costume Design by: Edith Head, Norman Norell
Set Decoration by: Edward G. Boyle
Art Direction by: Cary Odell
Music by: Neal Hefti
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: December 25, 1964
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