MartinHafer You know you've found a terrible movie where the best actor is a chimp!! Sadly, the chimp is only a bit player! Yes, "How to Commit Marriage" is an incredibly unfunny and offensive pile of bile from the hip, wacky 1960s. Jackie Gleason and Bob Hope is an odd combination but with this much talent, you'd assume the film would be funny. Well, you'd assume wrong!When the film begins, Bob Hope and Jane Wyman are a couple who decide, out of the blue, to get divorced. Soon, their daughter arrives and announces she wants to marry a nice guy. Because of this, the parents decide NOT to tell her about the pending divorce. As for his father (Jackie Gleason), he is a crass jerk who believes in two things...money and himself. He is a completely amoral jerk who tries to convince the couple to just live together. They agree...and when she gets pregnant, he then convinces them to give up the baby because 'babies are a drag'...and they do! Her parents, though divorced, swoop in to take their grandchild. There's more...but by this point the film REALLY lost my interest.The bottom line is that instead of making the film funny, THE joke is that the parents all decide to become hip....hip and VERY selfish. While I am NOT an old fashioned guy, the film seems to be a great endorsement of family and traditional values...mostly because everyone in this film is so hateful and nasty...especially Gleason's character. Perhaps a reworking of this MIGHT have worked, but with one actor well into his 60s and the other two in their 50s, it all comes off as amazingly contrived and ridiculous (you just have to see Hope in his Nehru jacket!). The script, actors and filmmakers all try way too hard to be clever and with it...but completely forgot to be funny. It's among the very worst films Gleason, Hope and Wyman have made...perhaps THE worst.

moonspinner55 Amusingly salty farce brings Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason into the swinging 1960s--and just in time! Hope and Jane Wyman agree to end their stale marriage after 19 years, just as their daughter decides to drop out of college and join a rock group with her boyfriend. Turns out she's also pregnant, and has been persuaded to put her baby up for adoption by a (bribed) Indian guru, so Hope and Wyman conspire to adopt the child under the guise of an Irish couple (don't ask). Gleason is Hope's would-be in-law, a rock music promoter who holds a grudge against Bob for a years-old real estate transaction that ended up in the mud. Tatty-looking comedy (with unflattering hairstyles) stays afloat on some funny one-liners, but loses momentum during two pointless sequences: a golf match involving a chimpanzee and the slapstick finale, an endless dig at the Maharishi. Despite this, Hope, Gleason and Wyman (and Tina Louise as Gleason's main squeeze) manage bright performances, and director Norman Panama excels with a romantic fantasy scene and also the opening montage, a cynical jab at married life. **1/2 from ****

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) I am not sure how I ended up witnessing this movie, most of it wasn't memorable, some drivel about Bob Hope wanting to get a divorce from Jane Wyman while at the same time imparting a conservative family-values mindset on his son (or was it his daughter?) who was betrothed to Jackie Gleason's daughter (or was it his son?). There's some sort of nonsense about a traveling psychedelic swami show coming to town and Hope impersonating the swami to try and lecture his young son on the importance of a proper marriage ... odd movie.The centerpiece of the film is howlingly funny, however, as Jackie Gleason suckers Bob Hope into playing a game of golf against Mildred the Chimp for a wager. It's a sucker bet too, and Gleason doesn't even have to rig the game: Gladys humiliates Hope with a display of golf prowess that would have made Jack Nicklaus blush. For some reason I found it hyperventilatingly funny, having trouble breathing as Hope & Gleason decked out in polyester golf outfits find themselves upstaged by a monkey. Only in America.

ajm-8 In the intended generation gap comedy, Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason play bickering not-quite-in-laws. I say "not-quite" because Gleason's son and Hope's daughter are cohabiting without benefit of matrimony.Living in sin.Shacking up, don't you know.The kids have a baby out of wedlock and put it up for adoption so they can concentrate on performing in their Top Ten psychedelic rock group, The Comfortable Chair (Cue Cardinal Fang: "The COMFY CHAIR!?!") Hope and estranged wife Jane Wyman (whose real-life ex-husband was governor of California when this film was made) adopt the tot using fake identities and, after a round of 3 a.m. feedings, grudgingly reconcile.Jackie discovers that Hope & Wyman have the grandchild, revealing the info during a golf match between Hope and a chimp. (You're ahead of me. Bob loses.) But Ol' Ski Nose solves everything by impersonating the youngsters' guru, a Maharishi-like religious leader, at a huge concert. In disguise, Bob tells the kids to forget nirvana and perfect happiness and get married instead. By the time everyone figures out who's who, the rock stars have their baby AND wedding rings, Bob and Jane are back together and the new house Bob just sold Jackie gets destroyed in a mudslide.Even for a wacky 1960s comedy, the events in this movie defy logic: What adoption agency would instantly hand over a newborn to a decidedly over-the-hill couple? Wouldn't Hope and Wyman face prison sentences for using phony names to get the baby? And how could Jackie Gleason attract Tina "I Trained at the Actors Studio, But They're Going to Put 'She was Ginger on Gilligan's Island' On My Tombstone" Louise? Hope's probably the LAST guy in Hollywood to have been defending monogamy, given his notorious unfaithfulness to wife Dolores over a seven-decade marriage, and it's doubly offensive that he spoofed an Eastern religious figure to do so. Imagine the justifiable outcry had he impersonated a priest or a rabbi.Gleason's in decent form but is given little to do. HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE isn't as utterly bizarre as another Gleason '60s vehicle, SKIDOO (1968), but simply one of Hope's worst starring films -- a pity, because for around 25 years Hope WAS a legitimately great movie comedian. At least it's interesting to see Leslie Nielsen play the straight man in this film, and the young lovers are JoAnna Cameron (who set the hearts of seven-year-old boys aflutter as ISIS in the 1970s) and Tim Matheson (who, FIFTEEN years after this movie, would still be playing a collegian in UP THE CREEK).