Watch The Out-of-Towners For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

A lot of fun.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

"I guess I'm just a little irritable" confesses Gwen Kellerman (Dennis), after the insufferable misfortunes she and her hubby George (Lemmon) have been gone through within a lesser-than- twelve-hour stretch, and end up being stranded in the Central Park of NYC, is probably what a first-time viewer vicariously feels at that exact point, and the misery is far from winding up.A Neil Simon's comedy directed by Arthur Hiller, who was in his heyday with a major awards contender LOVE STORY (1970) in the can the same year in December. The story involves a concatenation of mishaps which are constituted with hoary incidents, befall on the ill-fated couple from a small town in Ohio. George is scheduled to have an interview for a job promotion in NYC, which seems to be a cinch to get. So he arranges a stay in the Waldorf-Astoria, and a fancy dinner in the Four Season with Gwen, but starts with the busy air traffic control and an unexpected heavy fog around Kennedy International Airport, their voyage turns out to be an unabated chain of nightmares, whatever contretemps could possibly happen to the out-of-towners, happens, and they are all heavy-handedly implemented.Jack Lemmon has never looked so jaded and aggrieved, and Sandy Dennis has deteriorated into a ceaseless vent of annoyance as their plight aggravates. The movie is a farce intemperately piles up all possible gags consecutively, without any discretion to varnish a tad of empathy and reasoning onto its rudimentary ballast of cheap laughters. "New York will not stop me", this is the spirit, it is self-boasting individualism Vs. collective machinery of a metropolis, bluntly juxtaposed with a ridicule about bourgeois esprit and a then-topical reference of Cuba. You are aware of the intention, but can hardly buy it for the in-your-face combo-package.How much fun can one get from watching other people's misery? This film provides a feasible answer: nil if you overcook it, that is the unmistakable blunder trips THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS, it's as if you are watching a chapter of FINAL DESTINATION, waiting for something bad regularly occurring but in this case, death is not an option, not even on a hijacked plane to Cuba.

Only because I think Jack Lemmon was one of the finest comedic actors to ever appear in films or on stage does this otherwise angry, depressing movie manage to be a little bit entertaining. The grim and hostile tone of the film pushes it out of the realm of farce into the much less comical arena of social realism. The ever tightening circle of doom into which the hapless couple are ensnared is relieved only partially by Jack's masterful performance. His unequaled expertise in portraying an otherwise capable man under extreme duress keeps this bleak, heavy production lurching along. I watched this one immediately after enjoying The Odd Couple on TCM and the drop off in quality is quite precipitous, though to be fair few films measure up to the transcendent heights which that earlier masterpiece attains. Maybe it's also unfair to be comparing this dour film to that hysterical gem, this one apparently is not an actual comedy, no, not at all. It's more a cinematic examination of the deepening psychosis afflicting contemporary society; a clinical dissection of the unraveling American dream. But oddly, it seems intent on trying to convince me that it's really a preposterous, wacky comedy.The secret of comedy is timing, but unfortunately this misguided flick is written, directed and edited with a very poor sense of rhythm, comedic or otherwise. It's clunky and spastic. The beats which set up its gags and jokes are emphatically overstated and melodramatic, as though the real joke is on me for expecting a bigger, funnier punchline. And Sandy Dennis' character is so relentlessly shrill and tedious. But Jack is worth watching.

Not exactly one of Neil Simon's better scripts. The essential problem with TOOT is that the bad karma that follows Lemmon and Dennis is far too exaggerated, over-the-top, to the point where it can't be funny. If you want gags to work, in this kind of "reality-based" comedy at least, you need to make the characters and events seem real. That's not the case here.Dennis and Lemmon enter the police station exhausted, penniless, recently mugged, and wet – and yet she shows genuine concern for the milk strike in NY. "You mean to say that the children will be without their milk?" Not funny, merely stupid. If Simon wanted his female character to be retarded, then he should have made her properly retarded, in which case this kind of behaviour would be logical – hence perhaps funny. As it is, she behaves in a clear-cut retarded manner on several occasions, which doesn't add to the comedy level but drowns it out.What kind of woman would lose one eye-lash and then plow on with the one that's left? I have never met such a woman. Every woman would remove that other eye-lash straight away. And that's why that whole eye-lash business isn't funny at all. Perhaps a bag-lady or a loony woman might behave that way but not your normal, average 70s housewife, mother of two. Simon wants to have his cake and eat it too: have Dennis represent an average middle-aged woman, but also have her behave as if she's totally unbalanced and half-insane in order to get a few cheap laughs.The scene where Lemmon tries to find money in the kid's pockets? Unfunny. Total nonsense. It's stuff like that which makes this comedy rather forgettable, worthy of a few chuckles here and there, but that's about it. The pair getting filmed by reporters in front of the Cuban embassy was one of the few funny moments, especially in the overly silly second half."Plains, Trains & Automobiles", an 80s comedy with an almost identical premise, was hilarious, i.e. it worked far better, for the simple reason that the bad luck is mostly plausible, relatively realistic so that the viewer can identify with the situations and find the events funny as a result. Simon quite mistakenly thought that by making the bad luck increasingly absurd, this would somehow make TOOT funnier and funnier. The opposite happens; the increasing stupidity of what's happening to the couple just serves to bore and annoy until you just stop caring too much what happens next."After Hours", a superb comedy in which the main character also survives an abysmally unlucky night in New York, worked because it was clearly intended to have a slight fantasy slant, not to mention that the bad things that happen to its main character were mostly quite unpredictable, totally unique. In TOOT, there is no element of fantasy and most situations can be anticipated, some even minutes in advance. The element of predictability in TOOT is its second-biggest problem.For a proper Neil Simon comedy, check out "The Sunshine Boys", "Murder By Death", "Plaza Suite", or "The Odd Couple". Watch this only if you have very strong reasons to, such as Lemmon being your distant cousin or because it is the only movie being shown at the same time on 57 channels. Now, THAT would be bad karma for sure.

I guess I'll never get Neil Simon. I know he's received a lot of awards and accolades, but almost none of his works do anything for me, with the notable exception of "The Lonely Guy," but that screenplay was based on Bruce Jay Friedman's material, not Simon's own. Some become great, but only after they've been reshaped by others, like the classic "Odd Couple" series starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman.This movie is average Simon. Yes, I know it's supposed to be a comedy about how a night in New York becomes hell for a married couple. But the problem is there is absolutely nothing likable about this couple. George is a blowhard who's always taking down names and threatening to sue when he doesn't get his way. The hotel gave away his room because he didn't show up or call before 10 p.m. as the terms of his reservation stated? He'll sue! An airline rep tells him that they can't send his luggage because JFK Airport is still fogged in? He'll sue! What do you want, George, that they charter a plane and parachute your bags to you? But if George is obnoxious, his wife Gwen is like fingernails on chalkboard. I could die happy if I never hear "Oh, my Goooood" in her nasal whine again. She is so dumb that you wonder why George or any man would stay with her. She gives away his wallet and watch for absolutely no reason. If I was from Ohio, I'd be offended at how stupid these characters make Ohioans look. I think this would be a fine, funny comedy if it was about bad things happening to good people, but it's actually a film about bad things happening to stupid people mostly through their own fault. The vast majority of their problems are caused by George's pigheadedness, from refusing to eat on the plane to refusing to get out of the police car.But this seems to be Simon's habit. His characters usually have no redeeming value. Lemmon & Matthau's "odd couple" in his movie wasn't likable. It took the aforementioned Randall and Klugman (plus good writers) to massage Felix and Oscar into people we could like and cheer on despite their foibles. (Which Simon managed to undo with his eminently forgettable Odd Couple II.) They could still be annoying at times, but you wouldn't find it inconceivable that they would have friends. On the other hand, I'd pay good money to get away from Gwen and George and was happy at the end when they decided to stay in Ohio. The only good thing about this movie is being able to see NYC as it was in 1969.