The Out Of Towners
The Out Of Towners is a largely forgettable film starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn as a middle-aged couple from Ohio who fall prey to a variety of silly problems on a visit to New York. When Henry Clark gets a job interview in New York City, his wife Nancy tags along. She's worried because the last of their children has just left home, and the nest is empty. What has she got to look forward to? Nothing. So she takes the bull by the horns and decides to surprise Henry. Henry is surprised and very excited. When they get to New York, the plane is diverted to Boston because of fog. Henry has to be in New York by ten o'clock the next morning, or he'll miss the interview. At this point I was reminded of Martin's other film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which I'm afraid to say was far superior. Anyway, everything that can possibly go wrong does; they lose their luggage, they miss the train, and so on. When they finally get to New York, they are mugged by a guy who says he's Andrew Lloyd Webber. So then they can't check in to the hotel, because as well as this, Henry's credit card has been overused by his daughter. At this point, we meet the hotel manager, played by John Cleese, and thank God for that. He's brilliant as usual and as far as I'm concerned, he saves the film. Unfortunately he's not in it often enough. The Clarks are now homeless, moneyless and getting hungry. There follow some interesting scenes in which they try to get food any way they can, including accidentally entering a sex-addicts anonymous meeting, another scene which isn't very funny. Nancy tries to seduce a smarmy business man into letting them use his room. To escape from the latter situation, they scale the outside of the hotel and end up catching the hotel manager doing something embarrassing, which then allows Nancy to blackmail him into getting a room so that they can eat, and Henry can clean up before going to the interview.
The problem I had with this film was that for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, it just wasn't very funny, although I could see it trying desperately to be funny all the time. I think this may be because it was based on a 1970 script for a film of the same name starring Jack Lemmon. Perhaps the script was dated and just isn't funny anymore. Perhaps it wasn't even funny then. I don't know. But all I can say is that I was quite disappointed, as I was looking forward to another Steve Martin film.
On the positive side, I can say that there are some great shots of New York City, and one or two scenes do work very well, especially the ones involving John Cleese.
I was going to give this film 7 out of 10 for effort, but the very last scene was so stupid that I'm only going to give it 6.