As Quine’s last film for his first “home,” Columbia Pictures—and his final work with a number of frequent collaborators, including Blake Edwards and Kim Novak—The Notorious Landlady is touched with an angularity and autumnal wistfulness seemingly at odds with the farcical elements in the screenplay. Jack Lemmon plays a U.S. diplomat who rents a London flat from the title character, Kim Novak’s “black widow,” who is suspected in the recent disappearance of her husband. While Quine’s earlier comedies ultimately affirm a benign view of their protagonists, darker tones creep into The Notorious Landlady, resulting in a confusion of genres between farce, romance and slapstick that paved the way for Quine’s more sharply cynical 1960s comedies.

Richard Quine served as something of a mentor to Blake Edwards, who scripted several of Quine’s first feature films at Columbia, including Operation Mad Ball, one of Edwards’ earliest works to point towards his signature: A mixture of broad farce and social satire, combined in the service of a preoccupation with evolving sexual mores. Here, despite the opposition of their choleric captain, a group of enlisted men seek to have a party in order to fraternize with a group of Army nurses—who, as it happens, outrank them.