Dick Van Dyke is a national treasure. For the better part of a century, the comedic actor has been entertaining audiences with his endlessly flexible physical comedy, his sunny personality, and his big heart. He makes everything he’s in better, which means there’s really no such thing as a bad Dick Van Dyke movie. (Don’t double-check this, just trust me.) Plenty of Van Dyke’s films are crowd-pleasers, but only one was ever a certified, unanimously loved critic-pleaser — at least according to Rotten Tomatoes.
The movie in question is “Divorce American Style,” a comedy from sitcom producing powerhouse Bud Yorkin. Yorkin is best-known today as the producing partner of Norman Lear and one half of the team behind groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” and “Maude.” Four years before “All in the Family” hit the airwaves, though, Yorkin was seated in the director’s chair for “Divorce American Style,” a breakup comedy penned by none other than Lear himself. Van Dyke starred opposite another sparkling screen presence — Debbie Reynolds — in a film that earned Lear and story writer Robert Kaufman their first and only Oscar nominations.
Divorce American Style saw Van Dyke in uncharted territory
Like many of the highest-rated films on Rotten Tomatoes, “Divorce American Style” likely benefits in the critical score department thanks to the comparatively small number of critics who reviewed it. Any super-popular movie will inspire dissenting voices, as evidenced by the lower critical scores for some of Van Dyke’s most-loved movies (“Mary Poppins” impressed 97% of critics, while only 86% appreciated the artistic merits of “Bye Bye Birdie”). “Divorce American Style,” meanwhile, isn’t always cited as a classic, but it impressed the RT-cited critics who saw it … all eight of them.
While keeping in mind that Rotten Tomatoes sometimes misses older print reviews in its aggregation, most of the reviews we do have paint a very positive picture of “Divorce American Style.” Upon its release in 1967, a young Roger Ebert — having just started his job at the Chicago Sun-Times — gave the film 3.5 of 4 stars. He was one of several critics who praised the film’s surprisingly satirical edge, noting that neither Reynolds nor Van Dyke was “exactly known for biting social commentary” at the time but that the movie was “a member of that rare species, the Hollywood comedy with teeth in it.” Ebert concludes that the two unlikely leads “show they are capable of more challenging roles” in a movie that’s ultimately about divorce –- why, as Ebert says, “it is funny and why, in the end, it is not funny at all.”
Despite its sterling Rotten Tomatoes reputation, it seems that at least one negative review of “Divorce American Style” exists. Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review derides the film for not taking the subject of divorce seriously enough: he calls the movie a “jab at a social procedure that disrupts a lot of American homes,” and labels it “depressing, saddening and annoying, largely because it does labor to turn a solemn subject into a great big American-boob joke.” Crowther also disliked its leading man’s performance, writing that the “Dick Van Dyke Show” star is “too much of a giggler, too much of a dyed-in-the-wool television comedian for this serio-comic husband role.” You can’t please everyone, I guess.
Today, Van Dyke is most well-known for his family films and more straightforward comedies, but “Divorce American Style” remains a unique and acclaimed installment in his long, entertaining on-screen career.
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