The Gazebo

Elliott Nash writes crime for television. His wife Nell is a stage actress. One day someone starts blackmailing them over photographs taken of Nell years earlier. Elliott pays, pays again, and then makes a plan: get the man into the garden, shoot him, and bury him under the newly built gazebo. He takes the plan from one of his own episodes. He shoots the man and buries him. After that, every mishap a writer could imagine happens to him. George Marshall directs the American film; a hundred minutes, with Glenn Ford as Elliott, Debbie Reynolds as Nell and Carl Reiner in the cast, adapted from Alec Coppel's play. The comedy comes not from the killing but from the body refusing to stay where it was put, and from the man talking more with every step.