This is a horrible, dingy, drab and depressing movie. Yes, every line is an attempted Neil Simon zinger but they fall completely flat in this tepid context.
Lemmon is an actor I have never taken to - I see him as a prize ham who always sets my teeth on edge. Here, he sweatily ups the ante with a five o'clock shadow, damp shirt and crumpled suit, coupled with an irascible, hair-trigger personality that leaves you wanting to shake him and tell him to grow up and pull himself together.
Bancroft does her best, despite being lumbered with a terrible wig (at least I HOPE it's not her own hair) and a script that has her playing a doormat for most of the movie's length. Everyone overacts to beat the band, and the whole thing is so hard on the eye - what must those burglars have thought when they walked into this dowdy, cluttered apartment? So much of what we are supposed to find funny derives from shouting - the running gag about bellowing through the wall at the oversexed cabin-crew neighbours, for example - but I didn't laugh, I reached for the painkillers.
These manic, dental-drill scenes go on and on, reaching their apogee with the snow-shovel sequence - how long does it take to rip the brown paper off a snow-shovel? And...they wrapped a snow-shovel in brown paper down at the hardware store?? No wonder resources are running low 47 years later.
I'm so sorry I subjected my wife to this.
(Avoids a one-star review by virtue of the lovely but all too scarce New York location footage)
Lemmon is an actor I have never taken to - I see him as a prize ham who always sets my teeth on edge. Here, he sweatily ups the ante with a five o'clock shadow, damp shirt and crumpled suit, coupled with an irascible, hair-trigger personality that leaves you wanting to shake him and tell him to grow up and pull himself together.
Bancroft does her best, despite being lumbered with a terrible wig (at least I HOPE it's not her own hair) and a script that has her playing a doormat for most of the movie's length. Everyone overacts to beat the band, and the whole thing is so hard on the eye - what must those burglars have thought when they walked into this dowdy, cluttered apartment? So much of what we are supposed to find funny derives from shouting - the running gag about bellowing through the wall at the oversexed cabin-crew neighbours, for example - but I didn't laugh, I reached for the painkillers.
These manic, dental-drill scenes go on and on, reaching their apogee with the snow-shovel sequence - how long does it take to rip the brown paper off a snow-shovel? And...they wrapped a snow-shovel in brown paper down at the hardware store?? No wonder resources are running low 47 years later.
I'm so sorry I subjected my wife to this.
(Avoids a one-star review by virtue of the lovely but all too scarce New York location footage)