WARNING: SPOILERS

Most critics at the time, Dad included, wrote that Neil Simon’s “Seems Like Old Times” was an homage to screwball comedies of the 1940s. The plot specifically recalls the 1942 Cary Grant vehicle “Talk of the Town”: falsely accused man hiding in the home of a judge about to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court—that old gag—except in the updated version the guy is hiding in the home of his ex-wife whose husband is in the running for attorney general of California. The ex-wife, a public defender, winds up repping the man in court while hubby prosecutes him. So toss in “Adam’s Rib.”

It was a true tribute to those old movies, Dad wrote, because it stunk: “Watching it makes us long for the original, most of all when Chevy Chase is trying to be Cary Grant.”

Yeah, it’s not a good movie. It actually reminded me less of 1940s screwball comedies than 1960s sitcoms—particularly “Bewitched”: Oh no, the boss is coming over to dinner and … you know, chaos. Followed by flustered attempt to keep the chaos in the kitchen. 

Dogs + minorities
This is one of those rare Neil Simon-penned screenplays written straight for the screen rather than adapted from one of his plays. So it’s odd that most of the action takes place in one location. We can’t get away from the home of Glenda and Ira Parks (Goldie Hawn and Charles Grodin). Odder? That’s its main problems—that we don’t leave there. Or that he doesn’t leave there.

Nick Gardenia (Chase) is a writer staying at a friend’s home along the California coast when he’s kidnapped one afternoon by two men who force him to rob a bank. Why do they pick Nick? Never answered. But he’s photographed by bank cameras, has a drug charge against him already, and goes on the lam.

Why does he pick his ex-wife’s house to hole up in? Because he’s injured and it’s nearby? Or because he knows she has a thing for strays?

Her strays include dogs (the family has six) and former clients (the family has three). Chester (T.K. Carter) acts as chauffeur while Thomas and Robert (Joseph Runningox and Ray Tracey) are … gardeners? I forget. Is it problematic that the people strays are people of color? Dad thought so. “The film is full of stereotypes—Indian car thieves, uppity blacks—that seem designed to show that charity is wasted on undeserving minorities,” he wrote in 1980. Oh, and the Hispanic maid, Aurora (Yvonne Wilder), disappears just when the governor is coming to dinner for her famous chicken pepperoni dish. You can’t count on these people for anything. 

But the movie's biggest problem is Chase. Nick never has our sympathies because he seems less terrified man on the lam than privileged SOB poking at other privileged SOBs while trying to get into his ex-wife’s pants. “He seems to have two basic schtiks,” Dad wrote: “a dopey-looking deadpan that barely conceals a smirk, and a propensity for pratfalls, including one tumble down the side of a California cliff.” And most of these pratfalls are now done by stuntmen.

For some reason, we’re supposed to cheer him on. He’s the star, Glenda’s current husband is uptight, so we’re supposed to want her to wind up with Chase. We don’t. I didn’t anyway. Watching, I begged Neil not to do it.

Does he? Well, first there’s a trial before Judge John Channing (Harold Gould), who can’t fathom how interconnected everything is. Then it becomes more so. Those two bank robbers? They try the same stunt with Aurora but don’t get far, so they’re in the courtroom, too, and confess to doing the same thing to Nick. Freed! Outside, Nick kisses his counsel, long and slow, in front of Ira, leaving her dazed. Then Glenda and Ira are heading out on vacation, it starts to rain, he crashes the car to avoid a cow and breaks his leg, she runs through the rain to a cabin. The door opens and she smiles. The End.

If that’s Nick, that’s a helluva coincidence. Also: ick.

Old shtik
“Old Times” is the first and only feature film directed by Jay Sandrich, who came to prominence directing some of the most beloved sitcoms of the ’70s and ’80s: “Mary Tyler Moore” (119 episodes), “Soap” (54 eps.) and “The Cosby Show” (100 eps.). There’s hardly a sitcom during this period he didn’t touch, and he seemed happy doing them, so why did he do this? Who knows. But you get why he didn’t do it again. Reviews were meh, and while box-office wasn’t bad ($44 million, 15th for the year), both stars, that same year, appeared in movies much more acclaimed, lucrative and long-lived: for Hawn, “Private Benjamin,” which grossed $70 million, sixth-best in 1980, and garnered Goldie her only lead actress nomination; and for Chase, “Caddyshack,” where his smirky rich-guy persona fit in better.

At this point, Simon was coming off some of the best years a writer can imagine. He’d been nominated for Oscars in 1975 (“The Sunshine Boys”), 1977 (“The Goodbye Girl”), and 1978 (“California Suite”), which coincided with being nominated for Tonys about every other year since the late ’60s. He was hot. And then not. On Broadway, he’d still do “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers,” and on television “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but he never got another Oscar nom, and his movie output became increasingly less relevant and popular: “Only When I Laugh” ($25m, 31st for the year), “I Ought to Be in Pictures” ($7m, 80th), and “The Slugger’s Wife” ($1.8m, 143rd). I didn’t even know “Slugger’s Wife” was his.

Only two years separate “Old Times” and the original Hawn-Chase team-up, “Foul Play,” but that one felt very ’70s while you can almost taste the coming Reagan years in this one. The ’70s smart ass was still the hero, but nonsensically. His shtik was old and there was work to be done.

Here's Dad’s review.