Behave Yourself!

A priceless treasure, if only because it records Wilshire Boulevard before it was scrapped in 1985. If Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a Park Avenue comedy, and it is, Behave Yourself! is a rare commodity indeed, a Wilshire Boulevard comedy (and Park Avenue ain’t what it used to be, either).

The great coup was to cast Farley Granger and Shelley Winters, who are, in this combination, as unstable as nitroglycerin or as impervious as Frank Capra’s ducks. At this point the comedy, which is somewhere between Bringing Up Baby and The Ransom of Red Chief, is something that cannot be avoided, and tends to befall the picture with a careless but fastidious insistence.

Reports are that the Boulevard is being recreated at Walt Disney World, right down to the Thrifty on the corner of Fairfax (across the street from Johnnie’s).