The Out-of-Towners

Neil Simon was said to be the master of urban angst, and I don't know if there's ever been more urban angst than in his The Out-of-Towners, which was an original screenplay, directed by Arthur Hiller, released in 1970.

The premise is simple: a couple from a small town in Ohio visits New York City. He's going for a job interview, and if he gets it, the family will live in NYC. He's Jack Lemmon, she's Sandy Dennis, and from the beginning everything goes wrong and never stops. At first, their plane is delayed and then re-routed to Boston, but their luggage is lost. They manage to get on a train, but arrive at the hotel to find their reservation gone. They got robbed, get kidnapped by liquor store hold-up men in a police car, have to sleep in Central Park, get chased by a cop on horseback when Lemmon is suspected of being a child molester, then he breaks his tooth on a stale Crack Jack, and they get kicked out of a church.

All the while Lemmon, who's wound tighter than spring, is outraged and takes down an increasing long list of names of people whom he's going to sue. Dennis is more calm, accepting things in quiet resignation, and suggesting that Lemmon take the compromises he's offered, which he declines, demanding instant gratification (for example, the clerk at the baggage desk [Billie Dee Williams] offers him a free hotel room and the first flight to New York in the morning, but he childishly turns it down. As the film goes on, though it seems to be a shot at New York (there is a transit strike and a sanitation strike at the same time) the film is more about the assholes who people in customer service work with.

The film is frequently funny but doesn't hold up much. Lemmon is just too much to deal with, and New York isn't like this anymore (admittedly, it was bad in the '70s). The structure of the film is that they go through one bit of bad luck after another, so the graphing of this film is a straight line down, and becomes tedious. The thing that makes it worthwhile is Dennis' performance, who is the sensible one of the two, but even she has her breaking point. She also has a bit of a catch phrase: she lets out an "Oh my God" every time something goes wrong, and it's also the last line of the film.