What could have been a sharp satire on 60's sexual attitudes runs basically lame throughout, the script simply comes up short. The basic mistaken identity plot device fails to provide laughs and it is so much the base of the film's story that it's failure prevents the whole from going anywhere.

However, all is not lost. There is a saving grace, and that is the presence of the then 25 year old Natalie Wood, playing the sexologist Helen Gurley Brown.

Wood, in this film is staggeringly pretty. She had, at that age, a natural girl next door beauty that has rarely if ever been rivaled in film history. Seeing this film and Wood again recently for the first time in decades was a revelation. About her, not the mediocre film.

Really, what's not to like? I'd watch Natalie Wood read the phone book, and this flick left me wondering why Tony Curtis wasn't a bigger star, and why Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall were relegated to second-tier parts (though their roles were prominent).

Wood plays Helen Gurley Brown, author of the hit book of the film's name, and Curtis plays a magazine editor of a successful, seedy magazine that thrives on digging up dirt on people. Curtis sets his sights on scandalizing the virgin Brown. The laughs are many and frequent, with numerous subtle and not-so-subtle puns sprinkled liberally throughout. On the not-so-subtle side,the opening scene with magazine employees meeting with the CEO in the Board Room continually plays off the concept of the magazine seeking to feed off the lowest common denominator of human indecency. Another example occurred as cars raced along the highway, a sign noted that the highway's extension would be opening in December 1960. That was struck through and replaced with dates in 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1964, all struck through and ultimately replaced with something like "to be determined". I can connect with that jab even today.

Watching the movie caused me to research the 1962 book. Interestingly, the movie was loosely inspired by the book. And I mean loosely. The book is somewhat of a how-to guide, whereas the movie is a fictional imagining of the life of a much-younger Helen Gurley Brown, who was 40 at the publication of the book but 23 in the movie. Likely the movie's title was largely intended to parlay off the book's popularity. Good marketing.

It was also interesting and melancholy to note that the longtime delightful bit-part actress who played Emma Brand/Watson on the Andy Griffith Show, Cheerio Meredith, and had a minor role here, died on release day, 12/25/64. Burt Mustin also had a bit part. I always find it interesting to see actors such as Meredith and Mustin, who I mostly know from varying TV roles.

As usual, I loved seeing the sets and 60s style. I'm fascinated with the decade and enjoy seeing society's attitudes, fashions, and ideals in that era. This film brings that to life in spades.

I actually find this scatterbrained 1964 comedy a surprisingly amusing screwball farce all these years later despite its titillating title. So apparently does director Peyton Reed since he based most of his 2004 comic pastiche, "Down with Love", on the storyline of this movie and less so on any of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romps of the same era. Regardless, they all have the same brew of conjugal misunderstandings, mistaken identities and leering though never explicit sexuality because those were the days when a woman's virtue would never be compromised for anyone but the right man. Directed by the heavy-handed Richard Quine ("Paris When It Sizzles") and written by Joseph Heller (later the author of "Catch-22") and David R. Schwartz, this ridiculous comedy benefits from a game cast headed by Tony Curtis still riding high from "Some Like It Hot" (which is referred to for easy laughs in the story) and Natalie Wood who shows her comedy chops with dexterity here.

Curtis plays Bob Weston, a sleazy magazine writer for a men's magazine whose editors are intent on exposing Dr. Helen Gurley Brown as a fraud as a sex expert. Author of the best-selling "Sex and the Single Girl", Brown is not at all the clench-jawed celebrity author who wrote the real book and appeared on "The Tonight Show" constantly. Instead, she is a gorgeous, intellectually prodigious 23-year-old who extols female empowerment in the bedroom. Showing off his moral depravity, Weston steals the marital woes of her next-door neighbors, pantyhose magnate Frank Broderick and his acerbic wife Sylvia, and comes to see Dr. Brown as a patient. The rest is predictable but still a good amount of fun. Curtis was still at the top of his game here showing how he can easily elicit laughs from such a vile manipulator, but it's Wood who surprises as Brown. Displaying a nervous but infectious energy that feeds nicely into the two sides of the doctor, she is funny and sexy in a way that she could never quite balance as well again in her career. Witness the hilariously conflicted drunken scene in her apartment for evidence of her talent.

Quine was smart to cast three sharp stars in the key supporting roles - Henry Fonda as the put-upon Frank browbeaten into a sad man by Lauren Bacall pulling all the stops as the shrewish basket case Sylvia is, and Mel Ferrer as Brown's somewhat ambiguous colleague. Add a sultry Fran Jeffries who performs two numbers (including the title tune) for no apparent reason except to sell records, an even sexier Leslie Parrish ("The Manchurian Candidate") as Weston's secretary, and a genuinely funny extended car chase scene, and you have the makings of an under-appreciated sex comedy. The 2009 DVD, part of the six-disc "The Natalie Wood Collection", includes a Warner Brothers cartoon ("Nelly's Folly") and the original theatrical trailer.