The Out-of-Towners

TCM had a salute to actress Sandy Dennis some months back, and I'm pretty certain my posts on Sweet November and A Touch of Love were both recorded during that salute. I've got one more film from that programming block to write up a post on before the movie expires from my DVR, The Out-of-Towners.

Dennis plays Gwen Kellerman, a middle-class housewife in suburban Ohio who has two kids and a husband named George, played by Jack Lemmon. The kids aren't important to the story, however, as the action is driven mostly by George. He works for one of those big national companies that back in the day had their corporate headquarters in New York City, and he's up for a promotion. That promotion would involve moving the family to New York and definitely involves an interview at the headquarters. George has decided that he's going to do a nice thing for his wife by taking her to New York for a night on the town before the interview.

The interview is early the next morning, and George wants to make certain he gets in early, so he's taken every precaution to get on a flight that will allow more than enough time for him and Gwen to get in early and be able to enjoy that night out on the town. Except that, as you might guess, anything that can go wrong does. The weather seems nice enough when they get on the plane in Ohio, but apparently for the purposes of the plot weather forecasting wasn't good enough circa 1970 for the people running the airlines to realize that by the time the plane got to its destination an hour or two later, all three of the airports in the New York area are going to be socked in, and that the fog isn't going to lift for several hours. Long enough, in fact, that the flight is going to have to divert all the way to Boston.

Things continue to go wrong, as George can't find his luggage and then can't get a train to New York. They arrive in New York late enough that their hotel room has already been given to someone else, as there's a major shortage of hotel rooms in New York on the day for whatever reason. There's all sorts of strikes among government-sector workers, as if none of this was known to the people in the story and just magically happened at some point after George and Gwen got on the plane. Wouldn't such strikes have been major national news?

Everything keeps going wrong for the couple, to the point that you wonder whether or not George is going to be able to get to corporate headquarters in time for the interview. And even if he does, will he get the job?

The Out-of-Towners, with a screenplay by Neil Simon, is another of those movies that set in New York in the era that I like to refer to as being just before Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead. As such, there's all sorts of dysfunction that seems ripe for humor, with Neil Simon being just the person to write such humor. And yet, somehow it doesn't quite work here. I think that's in part because things are just a little too unrealistic: nothing can go that wrong. But the other part of the problem is that the Kellermans aren't the most sympathetic characters, with George coming across as a bit of a blowhard who thinks he knows everything.

If I were going to recommend Neil Simon movies to people, there are other movies I'd start with before The Out-of-Towners.