The Out of Towners

Neil Simon’s comedy of mishaps follows a couple as they travel to New York for a job interview. Their plane is forced to land in Phi ladelphia, they nearly miss a train to NY, which turns out to be standing room only, they arrive in New York in the middle of a mass -transit strike, they have to walk several blocks in the rain to get to their hotel, which has given away their room because of thei r late arrival. That’s where the trouble really begins. A series of comedic disasters follow that might make one think twice befor e visiting The Big Apple.
Neil Simon’s curious comedy The Out-of-Towners concerns a pair of non-New Yorkers (Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis) having a hellish visit to the Big Apple on the eve of a job interview for Lemmon’s character. Made in 1970 and directed by Arthur (Love Story) Hiller, this hectic film almost seems ahead of its time when compared to more recent misery-piled-on-misery comedies such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The couple in this film endure everything that can go wrong on a trip, including being forced to spend the night in a mugger-happy Central Park. The strange element in Simon’s script, though, is that Lemmon’s character is so unpleasant. A middle-class, uptight guy who can’t believe that New Yorkers in the service profession don’t perform their jobs slavishly, he’s kind of a one-note joke that quickly wears thin. It was remade with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn in 1999. –Tom Keogh