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A New Kind of Love is another game of footsy, one of those comedies that tries to make a virtue of its vice but can't decide which is which. In it, Paul Newman gamely plays an oversexed newspaperman exiled to the Champs Elysées after meeting too many deadlines with his boss's wife. Joanne Woodward is a department store buyer who treks abroad to pinch designs from Dior, Lanvin-Castillo and Pierre Cardin. Naturellement, she herself wears mannish styles and spectacles—she's a sort of hemidemisemivirgin, "a girl who tried love once but didn't like it."
When the two meet, crrraaaaazy things happen: Dior, Lanvin-Castillo and Cardin trot out their hautest couture; Maurice Chevalier sings a medley of old favorites; Thelma Ritter spouts excerpts from her treatise on contemporary mating habits. Soon all the 25-year-old virgins of Paris, apparently some 50 or 60 strong, go parading in homage to Catherine, patron saint of maidenhood. Woodward tags along, and St. Catherine tells her she'd better stop in at Elizabeth Arden's on the way home. Off go the glasses. On come the yawns.
Married since 1958, Stars Newman and Woodward here celebrate their fifth picture together. They are an attractive and talented pair, but the Lunts in their heyday could not have saved this one. So many men's-room jokes to memorize. So many interludes of leaden-footed fantasy to plod through. If A New Kind of Love didn't take the magic out of their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Newman are odds-on to become the sweetest little old couple in Hollywood.