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SO YOU WANT TO HOLD YOUR HUSBAND

Brother, is this one a mixed bag. First, it's obviously a gender-bender version of the earlier So You Want to Hold Your Wife, and this one is just as contrived as the earlier short.

The premise is how Joe and Alice McDoakes' marriage has gotten stale after 10 years -- a premise whose promise is immediately ruined by the short's dated sexual politics. We're told that the McDoakes met as co-workers in the same office (where Alice is first described as a "bird of prey"), but as soon as they've married, Alice becomes a housewife because Joe won't have a working wife. Oh, dear.

Then, when Joe starts dismissing Alice out of boredom, Alice listens to her favorite radio soap-opera, which has a similar theme and gives her the idea to seek out a marriage counselor. And wouldn't you know it, all of the marriage counselor's suggestions have nothing to do with Alice's emotions. They all involve Alice pleasing Joe -- fixing his favorite dinner, laughing at all of his jokes, and all of the other stale ideas that women's magazines used to toss at desperate bachelorettes to help them keep a man.

Alice's final scheme is to make Joe think she has run off with another man. So she leaves a faux goodbye note and clears out of the house. This results in the movie's funniest section, where a series of title cards tell us that Joe has been without his wife for two weeks and is too clueless to have even noticed the loss.

From there, the movie goes on to another weak attempt at he-man chauvinism before wrapping up with a very clever sight gag. Unfortunately, the era where spouses actually regard each other as equals and talk to each other about their real feelings -- at least in movies or TV -- appear to be decades away.

(Lastly, a moment of silence, please, for Art Gilmore, whose final short this is as the narrator of Joe's misadventures.)

Our rating:

(C) 2012, Steve Bailey.

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