Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon play two mid-western Americans who come to the Big Apple when Lemmon has a job interview with a prestigious agency. It's not enough that their plane is re-routed to Boston because of a fog-in, but the train they're on has no food to sell them and once they do arrive in New York, their reservation at the Waldorf has been canceled. Con-artists rob them; A man in a cloak takes Lemmon's watch willingly without even demanding it; Spanish-speaking visitors to Central Park accuse Lemmon of being a child molester; They end up in the limousine of a foreign ambassador who is the victim of a protest; Lemmon chips his tooth on the prize in cracker jacks and just about goes deaf when an exploding man hole misses his head by an inch. So don't think you'll hear Dennis or Lemmon humming the wispy tune that plays over the opening credits. All they want to do is get out of Manhattan as fast as possible, and I don't mean to the Bronx or Staten Island too.
This hysteria comes from the delightfully demented mind of the usual New York cheerleader Neil Simon who wrote about "Sweet Charity", gave us newlyweds prancing around "Barefoot in the Park", and lamented the life of a "Prisoner on 5th Avenue". Those were all Broadway shows that eventually ended up as films, and this film went straight to the screen without a stop where Seventh Avenue meets Broadway. This means you get a lot of great location footage of New York during the age of Aquarius and get to see visitors to one of the world's greatest tourist attractions being taken advantage of for being, as Roz Russell sang in "Wonderful Town" about her own people far from New York, "Babbity, Provincial!".
Unlike the later Steve Martin remake (and his similar comedy "Planes, Trains and Automobiles"), Lemmon and Dennis simply accept things as they happen, her occasional "Oh my God!" being more like "Here we go again!" rather than "Can you believe this crap?" Yes, Lemmon may threaten to sue every cop, hotel manager or bus driver who gives him a hard time, but its out of sudden frustration, and it is identifiable for any naive tourist or business visitor who had to get a bit tough when the city around them started moving faster than they could keep up with.
New Yorkers, as kind as they can be to tourists and business visitors, on occasion like to see the darker side of what its like for outsiders to come to the city, and the results are hysterically funny. It may not be funny as you go through the situations that Dennis and Lemmon go through, but you can tell that in 30 years, their characters would go down memory lane and laugh when the other one said to them, "Remember when..."
This hysteria comes from the delightfully demented mind of the usual New York cheerleader Neil Simon who wrote about "Sweet Charity", gave us newlyweds prancing around "Barefoot in the Park", and lamented the life of a "Prisoner on 5th Avenue". Those were all Broadway shows that eventually ended up as films, and this film went straight to the screen without a stop where Seventh Avenue meets Broadway. This means you get a lot of great location footage of New York during the age of Aquarius and get to see visitors to one of the world's greatest tourist attractions being taken advantage of for being, as Roz Russell sang in "Wonderful Town" about her own people far from New York, "Babbity, Provincial!".
Unlike the later Steve Martin remake (and his similar comedy "Planes, Trains and Automobiles"), Lemmon and Dennis simply accept things as they happen, her occasional "Oh my God!" being more like "Here we go again!" rather than "Can you believe this crap?" Yes, Lemmon may threaten to sue every cop, hotel manager or bus driver who gives him a hard time, but its out of sudden frustration, and it is identifiable for any naive tourist or business visitor who had to get a bit tough when the city around them started moving faster than they could keep up with.
New Yorkers, as kind as they can be to tourists and business visitors, on occasion like to see the darker side of what its like for outsiders to come to the city, and the results are hysterically funny. It may not be funny as you go through the situations that Dennis and Lemmon go through, but you can tell that in 30 years, their characters would go down memory lane and laugh when the other one said to them, "Remember when..."