Quote:
Originally Posted by belcherman
From what I've read, nobody involved was happy with Harry and Walter Go to New York. James Caan referred to it as "Harry and Walter Go to the Toilet."
I haven't seen it, but Caan's opinion is good enough for me.
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It ain't good, but at that price it's worth a punt for the curious if only because it's cheaper than the price of a movie ticket and you can probably turn it around on ebay:
“Oh they’re not oafs, Jack. They would require practice to become oafs.”
It’s a curious phenomenon that some hits get mythical reputations as big flops simply because they failed to live up to absurdly overoptimistic predictions while many a genuine box-office disaster is almost instantly forgotten and never mentioned again. Case in point Mark Rydell’s
Harry and Walter Go to New York, a sprawling turn of the 20th Century comedy that went so massively overbudget and did so catastrophically badly at the box-office in 1976 that it was the straw that almost broke the camel's back and nearly destroyed Columbia Pictures until a tax shelter fund for German dentists came to their rescue. Perhaps it was because every studio seemed to be on its knees in the mid-70s and most media commentators were convinced TV would kill off cinema once and for all before the end of the century, or perhaps everyone just wanted to pretend it never happened. Looking at it today it’s all too easy to believe it’s the latter.
It certainly had a solid cast (James Caan, Elliott Gould, Michael Caine and Diane Keaton when all four were still box-office) and a workable premise – hopeless song and dance men Caan and Gould find themselves in prison as valets to Caine’s briefly incarcerated suave celebrity millionaire master thief and steal his plan to rob an impregnable bank – but no matter how much money is thrown at it the film never takes off. Rydell claimed the problem was that the studio cut all the jokes out when they decided not to release it as a roadshow picture, though from the few attempts at humour that survive there’s nothing to convince you that what hit the cutting room floor was any funnier. Feeling at times like a musical that’s had all the songs cut out (aside from the duo’s signature routine), and not just because it was shot on Fox’s lavish Hello Dolly set, Caan and Gould take their lead from their hapless heroes and telegraph and hammer away at every gag or physical bit of business when they’d have been better off following Caine’s approach and (under)playing it straight. Not that Caine, in the kind of part that would have gone to David Niven a decade earlier, has anything funny to do either, but he glides through the fiasco with dignity intact.
Keaton, still in that stage of her career when she played her big emotional scenes with her mouth open so wide her fillings caught the light, seems to have been the victim of at least some of the cuts since a failed-romantic subplot with the two stars fighting over the favours of her radical newspaper editor is suddenly dropped into the picture out of nowhere quite late in the game simply to set up a closing gag. Still, there’s a lot of money on display (much of the detail of the street scenes was lost if you saw it panned-and-scanned on TV) and a decent supporting cast – Charles Durning, Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, Lesley Ann Warren, Ted Cassidy, Burt Young and many familiar faces - who don’t get much if anything worthwhile to do. And you can spot composers David Shire and Carmine Coppola in the pit orchestra while you’re wondering whose idea it was to name Gould’s character Walter Hill.
By all accounts everyone had a great time making it, which is always a bad sign in a comedy (Caan later sacked his management and dubbed the film Harry and Walter Go to the Toilet after seeing the finished film), and you can see why it looked like it could have worked on paper, particularly coming so soon after co-producer Tony Bill’s The Sting, but the best you can say about it is that it’s painlessly unfunny. Still, TT's region-free disc offers a good 2.35:1 widescreen transfer (though Lazlo Kovacs’ cinematography wildly overdoes the sepia-style colour scheme, a problem with the film's original look rather than overzealous restoration revisionism) with trailer, isolated score, booklet and, though I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to listen to it after seeing the movie, film historian commentary.
One of those films I really wanted to like but just wouldn't let me...
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