BEFORE: This is the sort of film that I'd typically save for February, since it seems to fall squarely in the "romance" category, but since the number of films on my watchlist is still less than the number of viewing slots left in 2015, I'm still hopeful that I'll be done with the project before next February. So I'm sort of in clearance mode - everything must go.
Anyway, in January Robert Redford was TCM's Artist of the Month, and they also did Friday night spotlights on Neil Simon movies, and this is the only film that satisfied both parameters. I'll deal with the Redford films this week, and then get to other Neil Simon work later. I don't have many week-long actor chains left on my watchlist, after this I'll only have tributes to Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, and Matthew McConnaughey. But connecting this tribute to those is a challenge, and also part of the fun.
THE PLOT: Paul, a conservative young lawyer, marries the vivacious Corrie. Their highly passionate relationship descends into comical discord in a five-flight New York City walk-up apartment.
AFTER: The intent here is to showcase a relationship between two very different people - in its own way, it's "The Odd Couple" super-imposed on a marriage - she's fun-loving, he's a workaholic lawyer, or at least he wants to be. She wants to go out on the town, he's got to get up early the next morning to be in court. I suggest that Neil Simon cheated by starting the play/film right after their marriage, so we never learn how these two people with different outlooks on life got together in the first place.
When I was a kid, I had one of those "Visible Man" models - you know, a kit where you assemble a skeleton and internal organs into a clear plastic body. I painted all of the organs the appropriate colors (or so I believed, but since no one's ever seen a real lung, you can't tell me they're not green), and I got ready to assemble the skeleton, but on my first move with the modeling glue, I attached the shoulder bone to the wrong vertebrae, and soon discovered that the skull/backbone/scapula assembly would not fit inside the clear plastic body. Any forward progress on the model from that point was impossible, so the unfinished kit sat on a shelf in my closet for years, and my promising medical career was cut short. Perhaps the lesson should have been "Measure twice, cut once", but instead I learned that if you make a big mistake early, sometimes there's no point in correcting it.
It's an OK lesson for modeling kits (eventually, I did get better at them, for what it's worth) but it's a terrible lesson for relationships. True, sometimes you may realize that you've married someone with principles that are fundamentally different than yours, but it's not necessarily a reason to scrap the whole project. You've got to work to undo the damage and try to put it back together the right way. If you try that and the pieces still don't fit, then at least you can walk away with your head held high.
But Corrie in this scenario declares she wants a divorce after just ONE wild night out on the town where her husband, Paul, acts like a total pill. She doesn't seem to realize that the honeymoon can't last forever, and that at some point, at least one person in the couple needs to have a job, and he (or she) needs to show up for that job on time and prepared. Instead, she pegs him as a "stuffed shirt" who is incapable of fun - hey, maybe he doesn't like ethnic foods, or underground restaurants in Staten Island who don't seem to understand that there's a health code. Maybe he just didn't like the way you were connecting with the older lothario who lives up in the attic, and pops in while you're walking around in a shirt and not much else.
Overall, this sends out a strange message for the kids - by depicting a hedonistic, self-centered irrational woman (who hurt you, Neil Simon?) who wants to scrap everything at the first sign of disagreement. And if your lady acts irrationally (and I'm not saying that they all do, again, take it up with Neil) your best bet is to get drunk like a homeless man before you decide that you really want the apartment and you should kick HER out. This is a romance?
Although the story starts at the Plaza Hotel (I've lost count of how many films this year are set in hotels) the real star of the film is the 5-floor walk-up apartment at 49 W. 10th St. with a tiny bedroom, no bathtub and a hole in the skylight. It's a chance for me to reflect on all the places I've lived since I moved out of the NYU dorm, which happened to be on East 10th St.
I spent a summer in a sublet on the lower East Side, which had a loft bed to conserve space, allowing me to hit my head on the ceiling if I happened to wake up without remembering that I was sleeping in a loft bed, so pretty much every morning. That apartment came with a lovely view of a park where drug mules would spend the morning removing product from the bodies (there are several ways to do this, and none of them are ways you'd want to watch). But I was also in a relationship for the first time, so I didn't sleep there all the time, and let a friend crash there before he returned to London, and I got in a bit of trouble for that.
Next I shared an apartment in Rego Park, Queens, with someone I knew from working on music-video shoots, and he was in a relationship, so he was almost never there, but he was letting a friend crash there, so I supposed that's some karmic balance for you. At least I got the bedroom in that deal, with my roommate sleeping in a tent in the living room, and it was big enough to hold all of my stuff at the time, but the lease came up after only a year.
Then came the 4th floor walk-up on Prospect Ave. in Brooklyn, with a succession of roommates who came and went, mostly went. One guy told me he just needed a legal address, and he'd be staying with his still-married girlfriend a few blocks away - that's really the best kind of roommate. I got married and my wife moved in, but it was hardly the ideal apartment - the steam heat destroyed all of my posters, and any breeze from an open window would blow out the stove's pilot light, plus the Prospect Expressway was right outside the window and two floors down, so heavy truck noise 24/7. Plus, a four-floor stair climb is fine, unless you have to get groceries, do some laundry, or buy any furniture.
One day in 1992, we found out about condos for sale on the other side of Park Slope, so we looked into getting enough money together for a down payment, calculated whether our rent money would be better served as mortgage payments, and took the leap. It was a building that had been abandoned and renovated, so there was no real estate tax for the first 10 years, and the developer seemed to be marketing the units toward teachers, artists and musicians. We got the asking price for the ground-floor unit down from 107K to 105K, and after living on the 4th floor for 3 years, the ground floor was a welcome change.
When the marriage ended and my wife moved out, I had to get her name off the mortgage and pay her 1/2 of our total investment to that point, or $5,000.00. I did this by taking in a (very messy) roommate and putting his rent toward buying her share - it was the best money I ever spent. Even though I had very little privacy (turns out people can see through your blinds if you live on the ground floor) and we were across the street from a homeless shelter, I lived there for 11 years, serving as Condo Board Treasurer 8 times. That was a great experience in being part of a community, helping to run the building's finances and learning about building repairs and upkeep. Plus, I got to see the asking prices whenever anyone would sell a unit, so I had a great grasp on how the Brooklyn real-estate market was doing.
By 2004 I was married again, and we sort of outgrew the condo - it only had one bathroom, after all, and no parking spaces, and we'd accumulated so much stuff I had filled my basement storage space, and also I had a storage unit holding comic books and other things. When my wife learned what the condos were selling for, she pointed out how much profit we could make by selling the place, and I had to admit she was right. Even though I probably had paid off only 1/5 of the mortgage, I ended up selling the condo for 4 times the original value, and we put that money into a house in Queens, buying 2/3 of it in cash and getting a mortgage for the rest. So now I'm in a three-story house, which admittedly has its own problems with crazy plumbing and being drafty in the winter, but we've filled it with stuff and I have no plans to move anytime soon.
But the real take-away here is that it's important for two people to share the same outlook on life, which is why I'm having such trouble with the new Late Late Show host, James Corden. He's just too eager for my taste, too willing to laugh at his own jokes - hey, isn't that FUNNY, everybody?? - dare I say it, he's just too positive and upbeat. He's a lot like Jane Fonda's character in this film - hey, we've got a telephone installed in the apartment! I can call a number and hear the weather! Isn't that GREAT? Hey, we've got a radiator! Whoopee, I'll alert the media.
I'm really missing the sarcastic sensibilities of Craig Ferguson, who became more funny after he sort of gave up and stopped trying, and found his own rhythm that way. That was what drew me to Dave Letterman and late-night TV in general, that sense of sarcasm and self-deprecation, and I'm really going to long for it when Dave retires. But if I wanted to watch someone overly enthusiastic, I'd switch over to Jimmy Fallon - but I don't, and I just can't. I'll give Corden another month or so, but if he doesn't learn to tone it down a bit, I'm gone.
Also starring Jane Fonda (also carrying over from "The Chase"), Charles Boyer (last seen in "Gaslight"), Mildred Natwick (last seen in "The Trouble With Harry"), Herb Edelman (last seen in "California Suite"), and a cameo from Fritz Feld (last seen in "At the Circus") - playing a restaurant owner, of course.
RATING: 4 out of 10 wedding gifts
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