Beneath the Rock

Marriage on the Rocks is the most recent effort to capture for posterity the fanny-pinching sophistication of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. In a coy casting switch, Sinatra plays a bored, busy advertising brain who has spent 19 years with his own wife (Deborah Kerr). "What a swinger he was in the old days," moons Deborah. Now he bedevils his teen-age daughter (played by Sinatra's own daughter Nancy) and deplores his rakish company vice president (Martin), an aging torn whose bachelor flat is strewn with molted bikinis.

Having first decided to get a divorce, Deborah gets a black negligee instead and entices Frank to Mexico for a second honeymoon. Their union is dissolved, more or less by mistake. Before they can get remarried, Frank flies off on a business trip. Then Dean shows up and, again by mistake, Deborah marries him. Home again, the befuddled trio runs into plot complications so dreary that Mother-in-Law Hermione Baddeley has to march drunkenly around the premises, tootling a bagpipe at intervals to keep everyone awake.

Rocks' least comfortable performer is Actress Kerr, whose fans may well wonder what a nice girl like Deborah is doing in a play like this. Wasted on farce, she sidles from gag to gag with the faintly startled air of a very proper matron who somehow finds herself pouring tea at a disreputable party.

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