The Out-of-Towners
High-Strung Comedy | 98 Minutes | 1970 | United States
(2/4)
Director: Arthur Hiller | Producer: Paul Nathan | Writer: Neil Simon | Starring: Jack Lemmon, Sandy Dennis, Sandy Baron, Anne Meara | Music: Quincy Jones | Cinematography: Andrew Laszlo
Imagine Jack Lemmon at his most highly strung, for instance in The Odd Couple, a Neil Simon film from a couple of years earlier, when Oscar Madison arrives home late from work after stopping off at a bar and Felix Ungar’s meatloaf has dried out, and Oscar thinks that gravy just comes, and then confuses a spoon with a ladle. ‘Spoon? Heh-heh-heh! You dumb ignoramus! That is a ladle! You did not know that’s a ladle!’, Jack Lemmon’s Felix Ungar explains ever more forcibly, vigorously shaking the ladle while the veins bulge in his forehead, at Walter Matthau’s perplexed Oscar Madison.
Imagining Jack Lemmon highly strung is not difficult because he was often highly strung, full of nervous energy or at his wits’ end in many of his most famous roles, from Some Like It Hot and The Apartment to Glengarry Glen Ross, and each and every time he and Matthau stood so splendidly opposite. So whatever first springs to mind when you’re asked to picture Jack Lemmon at his most agitated, now take that pristine moment of perfect frustration and stretch it out across the entire duration of a film. Does that sound like something you want to see? Does it?
For what you get is The Out-of-Towners, and if you answered ‘Yes!’ to the question above, scrawl the answer out and put in something different. Far from a pleasurable experience, The Out-of-Towners is exceedingly stressful. Neil Simon was off the mark too when he thought that there was enough here for a standalone feature. The idea of a suburban Ohio couple discombobulated by the big city was originally conceived as one act of his Broadway play Plaza Suite, which would get its own film treatment in 1971. Simon stretched the initial conceit and sent The Out-of-Towners straight to the big screen, but there’s not enough detail or nuance to the set pieces, and it turns out that supreme annoyance is funnier demurred by a little anxiety, irate tirades only capable of peaking if they’re offset by a few lulls.
In The Out-of-Towners, George and Gwen Kellerman (Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis) hand off their kids and head to New York. George is up for a big promotion, and this otherwise staid Ohio couple are up for the adventure – perhaps George a little more than Gwen, for he has the whole trip planned out. After landing at JFK they will check in to a deluxe suite at the Waldorf Astoria, enjoy dinner at the Four Seasons, which George extols as one of the great meals of the world, then a midnight dance at the Waldorf’s marble-clad Empire Room, before returning to their perfume-filled suite and all that entails.
None of it goes right. Traffic and fog cause their plane to circle JFK airport, and they are eventually rerouted to Boston, where they find themselves divorced from their luggage and scrambling for a train. George has refused plane food in order to build his appetite, but now the onset of hunger forces the couple to queue two hours for a seat in the train’s packed dining car, where the remnants of green olives and saltine crackers are all that await. When they do reach New York, it is raining, and a transit and sanitation strike compels them to walk the nighttime streets, piled high with garbage, while they get soaking wet. Their room at the Waldorf is taken, they are robbed, kidnapped, and involved in a high-speed chase, George is mistaken for a child predator and scurries through Central Park, and so on so that regardless of his job prospects, the couple conclude that they cannot possibly live in New York.
The best scenes in The Out-of-Towners are those which carry momentum, George and Gwen traipsing through the dilapidated and almost dystopian streets, or being hounded out of Central Park upon a slew of mishaps, aggravations, and false charges. George’s recurring threat to sue each of his offenders is more wryly comic. But Neil Simon’s script is too one-note, never-ending censure and consternation, and while director Arthur Hiller was given the run of Manhattan, there is a lack of visual breadth too as many of the scenes feel cramped. The Out-of-Towners never finds its rhythm, never attains a sense of space. Lemmon is fine with what he’s given as George, and Sandy Dennis enjoyable as his put-upon wife Gwen who nevertheless manages each indignity with a certain amount of naivety but also an even-keeled patience and grace. A slew of comic and character actors – including Sandy Baron and Anne Meara – appear in supporting roles, but to middling effect.
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