Gene Saks (1967)

All the action in Neil Simon’s stage play takes place in the tiny ‘Top-floor Apartment in a Brownstone on East Forty-eight Street, New York City’, where the newlyweds Paul and Corie Bratter start their married life.   The opening out of the action in Simon’s screen adaptation – a horse-drawn carriage ride over the opening titles, the honeymoon hotel, an expedition to an Albanian restaurant on Staten Island, the final (it could hardly be termed climactic) sequence on the roof of the brownstone – is perfunctory.  You can almost sense Gene Saks’s relief when he gets the Bratters up the five flights of stairs and into their cramped living quarters.  He gets some comic mileage out of the succession of climbs up those stairs.  The telephone engineer, then a delivery man, then Paul (with a large suitcase), then Corie’s mother, Mrs Banks:  all collapse breathlessly when they reach the summit.  Once he’s got the action where he wants it, though, Saks lacks the imagination to shape it for the screen.   The actors sometimes seem physically constrained not because the space is limited but because the director treats the apartment like a stage set.   It’s something of an irony that Gene Saks, who’s best known for his Broadway collaborations with Neil Simon and nearly all of whose directing credits for the big screen are Simon pieces, didn’t direct the original and hugely successful production of Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, which ran from October 1963 for 1,530 performances.   The play was directed on stage by Mike Nichols, who was otherwise engaged – on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – at the time the film was being made.

Barefoot in the Park is entertaining until its last half hour or so.  Neil Simon is a formidable comedy mechanic, there are plenty of decent one-liners, and the actors go far enough over the top with a running gag like the stairs-climbing to make it increasingly funny.  Simon is rarely as good when he gets serious – not least because you don’t believe he is getting serious.   The rift between the Bratters (a highly unappealing name – we can’t be meant to think spoiled brats?) is engineered simply in order for there to be something to resolve in the last scene.  You start to lose interest and, because of the falsity of the crisis, even Jane Fonda (Corie) struggles to keep the comic momentum going in the closing stages.  The rest of the time, she’s marvellous – she has a really brilliant exuberance, a fusion of performing instinct and empathetic characterisation that makes every line and every movement zing, yet is completely natural at the same time.  This role may have pre-dated Fonda’s feminism but it must have seemed pretty insulting anyway.  When asked what she does, Corie looks puzzled and answers, ‘I’m a wife’ – but Fonda gives herself to the part entirely.   That’s just what Robert Redford, as the ambitious young lawyer husband, won’t do.  The casting of him and Fonda in these roles looks, in retrospect, even more appropriate than it did at the time.    Paul’s controlled, anhedonic behaviour enrages Corie.  Redford can have a similar effect.   There are passages here where it seems to be the actor who’s expressing a reluctance to join in, as if he disdained light comedy – or at least had had enough of it playing the role in the Nichols production.  (Fonda didn’t play Corie on stage.)  When the focus is explicitly on Paul’s standoffishness, Redford comes into his own:  he speaks his lines as if he means them, and it’s not just his deadpan delivery of putdowns that makes him an accomplished comedian.  But Redford doesn’t let himself go, even when Paul gets drunk and takes his shoes and socks off in Central Park.

As Corie’s worrywart mother, Mildred Natwick (also from the original Broadway cast) gives a very likeable and skilful performance:  she has great moments when Mrs Banks’s anxiety takes over her whole body, or when she bursts out laughing before immediately realising, in horror, what she’s done.  Charles Boyer is gamely entertaining as the exotically eccentric neighbour who gets it together with Mrs Banks:  because Boyer really does have exotic charm, and wit, he makes the role much less embarrassing than it ought to be.  Herb Edelman is resourcefully funny as the telephone engineer; James F Stone is excellent in his momentary appearance as the elderly, out-of-breath delivery man.   Neal Hefti wrote the music, which at first seems meant to assist the images but quickly degenerates into one of those don’t-watch-them-listen-to-me scores of the time.  Hefti also co-wrote the title song, which is meant to have a frolicking tune.  Johnny Mercer, on an off-day, contributed rather clumsy lyrics.

6 August 2010