Well, UNDER THE YUM YUM TREE (1963) is one of those “bad” DUMB MOVIES that I like to write about – and
warn y’all off of! Starring the late great Jack Lemmon (in a film he later stated he himself “hated”) the breathtakingly beautiful Carol Lynley and Dean Jones, plus Edie Adams, Paul Lynde and Imogene Coca, this film has to be the worst of all the dumb “sex comedies” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Pretty damned sexless for a “sex comedy,” studious student Carol Lynley logically convinces her boyfriend Dean Jones to live with her platonically in a one-bedroom apartment in order to determine their compatibility for marriage.
Lemmon the apartment manager, determined to bed Lynley, does a lot of manipulation of the tediously predictable and unfunny variety, trying to wear out Dean Jones so that Jones has no energy to “take” Lynley, and though there is the absurd inclusion of a woman stripping down in front of, busty-chested leaning out of, being peeked at through, her ground-level bathroom window (which is more like a car-port) this film never succeeds in being titillating, entertaining, funny, or doing anything more than making the viewer want to jump up and turn it off (amazingly, the film was a box office success, and helped further propel Jack Lemmon to superstardom).
With a "bachelor pad" that looks like something Liberace might have lured his chauffeurs into (there are ridiculously automated violins, blood-red walls, gold spray-painted cherubs, and a French provincial bed) the unmanly, but apparently “lucky” Lemmon undermines the credibility of his stunning Oscar-nominated performance in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (1962 ~ in which he played an alcoholic) by here playing a happily unrepentant sleaze-bag always-drunk alcoholic, spying on his all-female tenants. Not even the inclusion of comedy veterans Paul Lynde or Imogene Coca can save this dopey and boring flick. Seriously, it took all of my willpower to sit through it to the end. To sum it up, this movie is nothing more than insufferably dated drek.
