Review of Under the Yum Yum Tree

Films certainly underwent some massive changes during the 60's. Compare the "chaste" sex comedy of this 1963 movie with the far more permissive and blatant movies of the latter part of the decade. Lemmon plays a relentless, lascivious skirt-chaser who runs an apartment complex called Centaur Apartments. Renting only to women, he says goodbye to former flame Adams and, before he can adjust to it, has rented the vacant apartment to her pert and very attractive niece Lynley. Lemmon can barely contain his glee as he sets out to carve yet another notch on his figurative bedpost, but he's unaware that Lynley has arranged for her boyfriend Jones to live with her (platonically) as well as part of an experimental, pre-marital arrangement! While Lynley and Jones wrestle with their hormones and strive to shield each other from temptation, Lemmon peers through windows and hangs from the roof when he isn't just trotting right through the front door with one of his many, many keys. The goings-on are observed by Lynde, as an envious gardener, and Coca, as his disapproving, cleaning-lady wife. Plenty of predictable misunderstandings and shenanigans take place with opposing sides either vigilantly defending Lynley's virginity or trying to get it taken away. All of it is handled with a soft touch through suggestiveness, innuendo or comedy. Lemmon tackles a very unusual role for him and is at least partially successful with it. He outrageously skulks around like Wile E. Coyote, with a battery of tricks up his sleeve, while appropriately cartoonish music plays. His antics eventually grow tiresome and he overacts with abandon, but it's still fascinating to see him in this light. Lynley was probably never more beautiful than in this film and, most of the time, she's quite appealing. She handles a stock "liberal, progressive virgin" role with skill. Jones (impossibly skinny, especially during the seduction scene towards the end) is charming and endearingly lunkheaded. He and Lynley make a very nice couple. Adams is saddled with a fretful role, but she looks pretty nice and manages a few nice moments. Handsome Lansing, as her new fiancé, has a very thankless part (one which was not in the original Broadway play on which this is based.) Coca is afforded several amusing bits as is Lynde, but Lynde was capable of far more hilarious screen activity than he's allowed to show here. Some of the material was just a tad obvious and tired, even for 1963. The film would have benefited well from a little bit of pruning in the redundant dialogue and more lengthy sequences. Still, it's a very colorful, silly, wacky romp that, if nothing else, makes for a fascinating time capsule of what filmmakers of the era thought (or perhaps wanted audiences to think) was the right way for people to behave. The sets are quite amazing, actually, though patently artificial-looking at all times. The opening credits for the film are really bizarre with a big fake tree hovering over two dancers as James Darren croons the title song. It's amazing how similar Darren sounds to the much later Harry Connick Jr. Incidentally, among Lynley's belongings in the apartment is a Darren LP! Bixby appears briefly as a potential male tenant, given the brush-off by Lemmon. A few years later, Ryan O'Neal, Leigh Taylor-Young and Harold Gould would film a pilot movie intended to set this up as a series, but it didn't come to fruition.