Films rarely get as stressful as in Arthur Hiller’s adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Out of Towners. This comedy is enough to raise anyone’s anxiety levels, despite the pompousness of the lead character.
Jack Lemmon is George Kellerman, who has an important work interview at 10am in New York. In order to have a chance of promotion, he must travel from Ohio to the Big Apple. Since it’s such a momentous moment, he brings along his wife, Gwen (Sandy Dennis). What follows is not so much a case of what can go wrong will go wrong, but how outrageously wrong could it go. From a delayed plane journey that drops them off in Boston to lost luggage, cancelled hotel rooms and muggings, there are plenty of disasters awaiting the Kellermans.
In his first film as sole writer, Neil Simon excels at painting a picture of the perfect middle-class couple thrown into a world they are not equipped to deal with. Lemmon is perfect as the immensely annoying Kellerman. Taking every setback as a personal slight – and keeping a list of names he’s going to complain strongly about – he’s the type of guy we’ve all met at some point. Sandy Dennis is equally brilliant as the put-upon wife. Her continual exclamation of “Ohhhh, my god!” and tendency to be right about situations that she’s not allowed an opinion on is spot-on.
There have been plenty of movies that have followed similar exhaustingly traumatic beats. Martin Scorsese’s superb and underappreciated After Hours (1985) and, of course, 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles (Steve Martin would later star in a remake of this film, but the less said about that the better) spring to mind, but The Out of Towners did it first and a little more believably.
Australian label Imprint’s Blu-ray (the first time the film has been released on the format) is light on bonus features, which is strange since they usually do a fantastic job of supplementing the movie. A commentary by film historian Lee Gambin and the trailer is all we get, but The Out of Towners is good enough to stand on its own.
The Out of Towners is available on Blu-ray from Imprint.
