This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer and producer Aaron Martin — creator of the very entertaining genre shows Slasher and Another Life, which dropped its very fun second season on Netflix last week — to talk about a movie he considers comfort food.
That would be The Out-of-Towners, the 1970 Neil Simon comedy in which Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis play a nice couple from Ohio who set out on an overnight trip to Manhattan, and are eaten alive for their expectations of smooth travel, good service and general civility from the city that never sleeps because it’s busy eating nice couples from Ohio.
Given that Aaron specializes in shows where literally everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and also catches fire despite being situated in the vacuum of space, I can see how he finds this movie comforting. It’s just two people, after all. No one will ever miss them.
You want to hear this, right? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web if you want to be one of those disruptor types.
And then you can go on to enjoy everything else I’ve done in the last week — including the latest episode of NOW What, in which I’m joined by Rad, Glenn and Alexandra West to trade Halloween movie picks that aren’t the dreadful Halloween Kills, followed by a chat with writer-director Julia Ducournau about making Titane, which is not dreadful in the slightest. (Have you seen that yet? You should see it.)
Elsewhere on the NOW site, my TIFF interview with Dune director Denis Villeneuve has been posted in advance of the film’s release this Friday — there’s even video! — and of course there’s Friday’s review digest, featuring my capsule takes on I’m Your Man, The Last Duel, The Velvet Underground and Criterion’s new restoration of Onibaba.
I think that’s everything. But there’s a lot more to come.
Fun episode. THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS is indeed a lost gem. There’s a key topic here you did not mention that I think illuminates this film and lots of Simon’s other work: his life long assimilationist project. That is, his desire simultaneously to hide or camouflage his Jewishness while also channeling the brilliance of Jewish comedy that was his inheritance, often putting it in the mouths of non-Jewish actors and characters.
In the introduction to his first volume of published plays, where Simon talks cryptically about his “different” background growing up without ever using the words “Jew” or “Jewish”, he states flatly the ambition he first felt as a young boy gazing at the bright shiny island of Manhattan from his outer borough ‘hood – to be accepted and respected by THEM, the OTHERS, i.e., the ruling goy society. And that is what he set off to do. This story is certainly not unique to Simon.
His very first play, COME BLOW YOUR HORN (1961) positively aches with a desire to pass, to be like THEM, to not be Jewish! Enter the “Baker” brothers in their Upper East Side apartment. The family is deracinated, I think we’re even meant to believe they are WASPs (clearly WASPs are the audience Simon wanted for his play). And yet the problem is, Simon knows absolutely nothing about WASPs or how they talk. But he does know the Jewish family. And so we have the spectacle of essentially Jewish characters trying to pretend they are WASPs. Or at least Simon’s idea of what WASPs are.
This dynamic – Simon simultaneously writing what he knows while trying to pretend his characters are not the guys he grew up with across the river – was often exacerbated by casting, especially in films. There is no better example of the aspirational nature of Simon’s project than the casting of Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in the 1967 (!) movie version of his 1963 play BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Look Ma! Happy, shiny white people! How would this movie have played with, say, Norman Fell and Barbara Streisand? Which couple do you think Simon would have preferred? Why?
As a play, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK was hopelessly backward-looking in 1963. Actual contemporary theatre was already producing earth rocking masterpieces like WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1962). But by 1967, the story is absurdly out of time. Watching Redford and Fonda swan around Central Park in a carriage, it could be 1957. Nary a sign of the 60’s. Sound like any other Simon film you know?
On the page, the characters in BAREFOOT IN THE PARK are not explicitly Jewish. It’s the same two step routine – give them the crack ethnic dialogue and mania, pretend they’re goy. But if there was any doubt, casting Redford and Fonda in the movie is the absolute embodiment of what Simon was about (and what he does again in THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS). I understand Simon himself may not have been in charge of every casting and production detail of his work on stage and screen. But no matter whose decisions went into the final products, it is impossible to watch a film like BAREFOOT IN THE PARK and not marvel at the aspirational assimilation playing out. And who wouldn’t want Robert Redford and Jane Fonda to play you?
So circling back to why we’re here – THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS. Now it’s three years AFTER the dated BAREFOOT IN THE PARK movie. They actually filmed THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS in 1969. 1969 in New York City and America! Uh, I don’t know, was there anything big happening in the culture at large? What Simon has made here is essentially a 1960 movie in 1970. This movie is really of THE APARTMENT era in every way, with maybe a few contemporary references to garbage and crime (mercifully the mugger is white) thrown in. But the film is completely out of synch with its time. And why is that?
Because Simon is. For Simon, the Ohio suburbs are not filled with squares. These are not regressive people who don’t get it, stuck in the daily grind. The suburbs are where he’s trying to get to, to escape the seething ethnic caldron of the Bronx. (Non Jewish) suburbanites are the people Simon wants to do his dance for, the people he wants to be accepted by. He is performing for them. George and Gwen are pillars of the status quo. There are no hippies in this film. The 60’s did not happen at all for Simon. Or the 70’s. And thank god for that. Imagine the old photos we’d have of him with long hair and beads dressed like Paul Simon in ANNIE HALL. The photos we have of him in those eras are bad enough.
In THE-OUT-OF-TOWNERS we once again have a puzzling ethnic type in the lead – George “Kellerman”. But played by all star Irish catholic Jack Lemmon. And Sandy Dennis. Again, imagine a casting with Norman Fell and Barbara Streisand. That actually would have made a lot more sense here. Because there has never been and never will be an Ohio suburban goy who is anything like the George Kellerman we see on screen. This guy does not exist in Ohio. Any more than the town of Twin Oaks exists in Ohio. My family is from Ohio. George is not. Once again, Simon does his two step and puts his stammering urban dialogue into the mouths of goy actors and characters from the sticks. And why does he do that? You’d have to ask him.
So for me, part of the sheer joy of THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS is watching this bizarre undercover project work itself out yet again. I’m not saying I don’t like this film. I straight up love it, mainly because it is theatrical farce. But it is fascinating to see Simon caught between two worlds, like that cat in the poster standing with one foot on the dock and the other on a boat moving farther away from the dock. He wants to have it both ways – characters who crack wise and move at light speed like the people Simon knows from going up, but look like the more reserved establishment white people across the river. It’s as if he wants Walter Matthau to pull on a Robert Redford mask, to cover that pock marked face and smashed nose with the blond hair and glowing skin. Give us that Matthau attitude, but look like the people in the society pictures. It’s the oldest American story there is.
To my knowledge, Simon never reckoned with or addressed his Jewish heritage in the way that other artists on similar paths (Spielberg comes to mind) did. Apparently all he wanted was to be like THEM – THOSE PEOPLE. And in his case, this peculiar but age old psychological drive produced one of the most successful American playwrights of all time.