What a Way to Go!

Louisa May Foster wants nothing more than an ordinary marriage built on love, yet her life keeps taking an unexpected turn. Each of the men she marries becomes enormously wealthy, and each dies soon after, leaving her richer and unhappier than before. When she tries to hand a fortune to the tax authorities, her behaviour is taken as a sign of instability and she is sent to a psychiatrist, to whom she recounts the story of her four marriages.

The 1964 American comedy was directed by J. Lee Thompson, the seventh of the twenty-one films he directed in chronological order, following Taras Bulba and preceding Mackenna's Gold. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote the screenplay, and Arthur P. Jacobs produced. Shirley MacLaine plays Louisa, with Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Gene Kelly and Robert Cummings among the husbands, in a cast of fifty-four credited performers.

Produced by 20th Century Fox with APJAC Productions and Orchard Productions, the film had a budget of 20 million dollars and took 13 million dollars worldwide, so it did not recover its cost at the box office. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1/10 from 109 votes, while the film critics' rating stands at 4.7/10 from 11 reviews, a marked gap between professional and audience responses.