Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis realise that New York City is not just the city that never sleeps, but can also be the city where it's impossible to sleep.

This Neil Simon penned comedy is also one that you would find it impossible to sleep through as it practically never stops at any point. Poor Dennis and her weak ankles are dragged practically the whole way around the Big Apple (and Boston) by Lemmon, who just wants to find something to eat and a place to sleep before a very important job interview in the morning. The only problem is that everywhere is full due to a city-wide transit strike.

So catastrophe piles on top of catastrophe. Reservations at the…

"A little obstacle like New York City is not gonna stop me!"

A provincially-minded executive drags his well-meaning wife through a hectic tour of the world's cultural capital, along the way repeatedly endangering their lives and thoughtlessly berating service employees. The values being promoted in this film are odious and my abject hatred for Neil Simon's male characters remains intact, but Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis are pretty amusing together nonetheless. Journeyman Arthur Hiller squeezes what he can out of average material, though The Out-of-Towners doesn't come close to the kooky charm he'd later find with The In-Laws.

Also of interest, Jerry Seinfeld lifted a fair amount of this material for his sitcom. Lastly, how about that sequence wherein George…

Out-of-Towners, directed by Arthur Hiller, is an amusing film that follows the trials and tribulations of a couple, Gwen and George Kellerman, from small town Ohio as they take a trip to New York City on business. George, played by Jack Lemmon, has a big job interview there, and Gwen, played by Sandy Dennis, tags along. Unfortunately Gwen and George have about as much luck navigating airports, trains, taxis, hotels, etc. as I normally do and end up experiencing mishap after mishap, most of which are out of their control. Neil Simon wrote the screenplay, which contains many great one liners and funny situations. Lemon and Dennis have great chemistry in the movie and are hilarious. The movie perfectly captures the…

Arthur Hiller's The Out of Towners starts out as a nice comfort food comedy with increasingly more ridiculous and clever ways to obstruct its characters, but after thirty minutes or so it deteriorates into a stressful, repetitious slog where the situations grow more contrived and the performances more unpleasantly grating.

Anything with the great Jack Lemmon is always worth checking out, but not this one. I found The Out of Towners to be an endless series of mishaps that became extremely tiresome to watch. This tale of an obnoxious neurotic and his annoying wife (Sandy Dennis, who is great in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.) running into one disaster after another, happening at the rate of probably one screw-up every…

Anything with the great Jack Lemmon in it is worth checking out, though unfortunately this Neil Simon penned caper comedy leaves a lot to be desired and mostly squanders the talents of both Lemmon and the underrated Sandy Dennis.

There are a few laughs and some delightful moments watching a married couple suffer mishap after mishap as their journey to New York becomes a nightmare of unmitigated disasters—their plane lands in the wrong city, everyone's on strike and the Waldorf Astoria is fully booked. It's mostly rather tedious however, the gags soon wear thin and making the characters totally insufferable means it's difficult to elicit any sympathy for them—the husband is a pompous neurotic whilst Dennis' character only gains a…

This is one of those comedies that really works by having a funny central cast and just kinda letting them do their thing, rather than having 'jokes' per se.

Luckily, here it works pretty well, with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis playing an uppity couple who try to make it through New York City for a job interview, getting into many a charming scrape along the way. They have, to undermine it, good patter. They bicker the entire time, and much of the comedy comes from their circular and competitive complaints, and Lemmon's complete inability to accept advice from any of the kind people around them, convinced that the entire city is looking down on him. It's probably not for…

I wish Sandy Dennis had more to do in this but she’s still great in it. Lemmon is putting on a comedy masterclass. I don’t expect this to make sense but watching him run around in circles is like watching a ballet about a dinosaur. 
This is a fish-out-of-water comedy where the fish are two impossibly naive upper middle class people, and the water is a gigantic house in Ohio. New York City here they come! But they’ll have to face hardship along the way, like getting relentlessly tortured by an indifferent universe, and by the consequences of their own idiotic mistakes! The Husband is a complete asshole, and a delusional maniac, for whom the Wife has boundless patience. I…

This may be billed as a comedy but really it's horror movie about how the world is out to stop you if you try to plan things too perfectly. Jack Lemon is, technically, a bit of an asshole here, constantly bickering with porters, taxi drivers and policemen and putting them on his to-sue list. But he's also Jack Lemon and you've got to love him and his mastery of physical and verbal acting. He's balanced out by Sandy Dennis as his mostly calm and fully loyal wife who goes along with all his increasingly deranged rants as he desperately tries to get to a job interview in New York. You may not laugh that much but incident after terrible incident…