Something appears to have gone wrong somewhere between Broadway, where The Marriage-Go-Round sustained itself as a hit play from October 1958 to February 1960, and Hollywood, where it is just a rather tame and tedious film. There isn’t a great deal of novelty or merriment in the Leslie production, which Stevens adapted from his own play.
It rotates laboriously around one joke #- the idea that an amorous Amazonian doll from Sweden would match endowments, gene for gene, with a brilliant cultural anthropology professor from the US. Since the prof is a happily-married monogamist, Miss Sweden’s forward pass is intercepted right in the shadow of the goal (of bed) posts.
In the role of the professor, James Mason is competent, managing to stay reasonably appealing in a perpetual state of mild flabbergastedness. Susan Hayward does exceptionally well in the role of the wife. Julie Newmar, who won the Antoinette Perry Award as best supporting actress for her Broadway performance as the gregarious glamorpuss from Scandinavia, appears to have misplaced her award-winning attributes. The intimacy of larger-than-life celluloid reveals a queen-sized heap of overacting from the blonde bombshell.
