The Out-of-Towners

Ohio businessman Jack Lemmon is offered a golden job opportunity; all he has to do is relocate himself and wife Sandy Dennis to New York City. What follows has led some critics to complain that playwright Neil Simon has written a "hate letter" to Manhattan. We don't think so: Lemmon and Dennis behave with such bull-headed obnoxiousness that they virtually beg for their shabby treatment in New York (maybe this is a hate letter to Ohioans). Within a 36 hour period, the couple (a) loses their airplane luggage; (b) are forced to travel from Boston to New York in a greasy old train; ( c ) can't get any sort of service because virtually everyone in Fun City is on strike; (d) are mugged twice, once while they're asleep; (e) are reduced to sleeping on Central Park benches in their day clothes.....and so it goes, until the shabby, disheveled Lemmon tells his prospective bosses off, and he and his wife head back to Ohio—almost. Punctuated by Sandy Dennis' plaintive "Oh, my Gawwwwd", The Out of Towners is either fall-down hilarious or relentlessly irritating, depending on one's frame of mind. Filmed on location, the picture is an embarrassment of riches so far as character actors are concerned (Milt Kamen, Anne Meara, Phil Bruns, Dolph Sweet, Richard Libertini, Paul Dooley, Robert Walden, Ron Carey etc. etc. etc.) When first shown on network television, The Out of Towners was shorn of its punch line, due to an archaic "anti-hijacking" TV rule. — Hal Erickson