It actually has something truthful to say about the way we live now and says it with a savagery of tone that runs completely counter to the warm, babbling, socially meaningless flow of our comic mainstream.

Debbie Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke are gruesomely well-cast.

Undoubtedly, the movie's makers sat down to several screenings of Divorce Italian Style with pencils and pads in hand and mapped out American counterpart situations. But the ideas do gain in the American translation.

Trivia alert: Tim Matheson is Debbie's teenage son