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Cactus Flower (1969) is a farce so seamlessly put together that it makes it seem easy to do comedy. It’s all about the tangle of vines that sprout from a lie that, as one character puts it, is “such a big, dirty, rotten, filthy lie, it has class.” The lie is being told by a lothario Manhattan dentist named Julian (Walter Matthau). The woman on the receiving end is his 21-year-old girlfriend, Toni (an astonishing Goldie Hawn, in her film debut). Julian hates getting too involved with his ongoing rotation of love interests, so he’s told Toni, a more recent acquisition, that he’s married with three kids. He figures it’ll work as a great excuse on the nights when he has dates with other women and a great thing to have in place in general to make sure Toni never gets too pushy about why he isn’t as available as she’d like him to be. 

The problem is, Julian reveals soon into Cactus Flower, is that Toni has turned out to be a catch he misses when she’s gone. He thinks he actually might love her. And she definitely loves him back: Cactus Flower opens with her trying to kill herself by turning up all the gas in her apartment when he cancels dinner plans. (She’s rescued in the nick of time by a close-in-age next-door neighbor named Igor, a playwright who gets by on loans from his father played with a just-right icing of sardonicism by actor Rick Lenz.) The suicide attempt becoming a confirmation of her life-or-death devotion to him, Julian calls a ceasefire on his womanizing and proposes.

It isn’t until afterward that Julian realizes how much a mess he’s made for himself. Because Toni thinks he’s married with children, she isn’t comfortable offering an unequivocal yes until she’s at least gotten to know the wife. She wants to make sure Julian is actually being accurate when he says his spouse wants a divorce just as much as he does. Though the opening-scene suicide attempt might in another movie be an initial sign that Toni is rash, the film lets us know as it unfurls that she simply feels a lot and is very in touch with her and other people’s emotions. She feels enough for two people. Much of the time spent in Cactus Flower reveals that, despite being an age associated with recklessness, Toni doesn’t take being the other woman lightly, and compassionately is only OK with moving forward in a tricky relationship if her happiness isn’t coming at the expense of somebody else.

At the nexus in a career where she’d transform from a goggle-eyed, game-for-anything silly goose on a variety show into a bonafide movie star, Hawn is wildly expressive, animated. She gives the kind of star-making turn that you so seldom see that, when you do come across one, it’s a little like watching magic happen. You’re so certain you love her, that from here on out there could be no other outcome besides becoming a star, that you couldn’t picture a world where this would have been an early high that would be trailed by diminishing returns. 

To help detangle his knot of deceit, Julian asks his ultra-loyal secretary, Stephanie (Ingrid Bergman), whether she’d be willing to pose as his wife. He doesn’t think about how rude this request comes across, especially since it’s being suggested at the end of the very first time he’s ever asked her out for after-work drinks; he also doesn’t think about, because he doesn’t know even though most other people could probably tell, that Stephanie is obviously in love with him. She orders him shirts when she notices the ones with which he’s been showing up are looking a little worn; she makes him chicken- and egg-salad sandwiches when it seems like he won’t be able to have a minute away from the office to step out for lunch. 

Stephanie will play the part, but only on impulse: while out with her young nephews one weekend afternoon, she passes the record shop where Toni works and convinces her that she’s the real deal. Which would be great, if Toni didn’t sense, from Stephanie’s true emotions peeking through, that Julian actually was exaggerating when he said that she too was dying for a divorce.

Cactus Flower’s misunderstandings only mount, especially after more “actors” are thrown into the mix and Stephanie begins to lean so much into a new, more outward persona as “the wife” that she finds herself sort of liberated as a woman who has so recently loved and lost. (Romance has been a part of this unmarried woman’s life before, but it’s been so long that it’s like she’d forgotten what it felt like to be in a relationship.)

Cactus Flower is complicated and fast-moving both narratively and in its stylized dialogue. But like many of the other movies written by frequent Billy Wilder collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (1959’s Some Like It Hot, 1960’s The Apartment), it’s a comedy where the laughs are steady but don’t trivialize the characters — who always feel human — or the emotional hurricanes they get caught up in thanks to the kinds of situations that only would happen on a stage and never in real life. Cactus Flower doesn’t patronize (as it might have with a less emotionally astute writer) Stephanie or Toni, who it respectively could have looked down on as a miserable old maid type or a silly-little-girl 20-something. It paints them sympathetically as women trying to navigate frustrating situations the shared man in their life has thrown at them. You come to care deeply about what they’re feeling and where they’re going to go. 

It’s sort of a miracle that you don’t completely hate Julian. That probably can be chalked up to Walter Matthau being so likable — charmingly grouchy dog-like — even when he’s wading into asshole territory, and how the movie presents him as emotionally immature and foolish when it comes to self-preservation but not necessarily mean-spirited. You don’t gun for Stephanie and Toni to enact revenge on him for what he’s put them through. You’re more so gunning for him to turn over a new leaf on account of these women who are obviously too good for him. It’s obvious, watching Cactus Flower, that we’re watching a trio of performers at the top of their game, blessed with material that lets them have a little fun but not so much fun that it takes away from the serious, big feelings through which the lovestruck characters they play are working.