Lord Love a Duck (1965 George Axelrod & co-scr)

Lord Love a Duck is a wildly praised satire of sixties US culture, but it's an exhausting and difficult first hour in which everyone seems to be nearly hysterical - certainly scenes with Tuesday Weld and her father Max Showalter, and principal Harvey Korman. Axelrod wrote it with Larry Johnson, from Al Hine's 1961 novel. Even Neal Hefti's music is atypically poppy.

Axelrod also directed his own screenplay The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968) and wrote:

How To Murder Your Wife (1965)
Paris When It Sizzles (1964)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
The play of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957)
Bus Stop (1956)
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Phffft (1954)

Good title scene (Murray Naidich) promises a Richard Lester type treatment which it doesn't deliver. Photographed by Daniel L Fapp.

Rest of cast: Roddy McDowall (way too old), Ruth Gordon, Martin West, Lola Albright (mother).

A mollymawk is an albatross.... Is the film? One or two funny moments overwhelmed by .. something.