The plot is a pretty familiar one. Free-spirited woman (Jane Fonda) marries stodgy guy (Robert Redford), and decides they aren't a good match. The audience knows better, of course, and it's fun to see what happens before Fonda and Redford know better, too. Or it was fun for me and Judy. It's a very '60s movie, and maybe today it wouldn't play at all for a young couple the way it did for us.
Fonda and Redford are young and beautiful, while Charles Boyer and Mildred Natwick are older and maybe a little faded, but it's Boyer and Natwick who very nearly steal the show with their romance. Boyer was terrific, and so was Natwick, even though she's playing a variation on a role she played many times. Or maybe because she's playing a role she played many times.
It frightens me to realize that I'm now a good bit older than either Boyer or Natwick was when they made this movie. When I saw it, I never dreamed I'd be any older than I was that night in the theater. Better not pursue that line of thought. Anyway, this movie will always remind me of a time when I was a lot younger and the world was a different place.
10 comments:
Hmmm...I was always ready to be older, but was hoping that all the blights of middle age would perhaps not come so Thoroughly home to roost...of course, when I was reading Simon's plays, I was at an age that the one that Got to me the most was COME BLOW YOUR HORN...as someone who would be playing Murray the Cop in a HS production of THE ODD COUPLE a year or two later...
"When I saw it, I never dreamed I'd be any older than I was that night in the theater."
That is the best line I've read for some time and reminds me of the same feeling I had in a different theater many years later watching some other movie.
Todd, Herb Edelman - who did indeed play Murray the Cop - was the telephone repairman in PARK.
But you probably knew that.
Jeff
I loved this movie. Life seemed so simple then.
I listened to the audio versions of Neil Simon's plays last summer when I was in Rehab. Loved BAREFOOT IN THE PARK! I had forgotten plenty of parts of the movie.
I first saw this movie in my 20s and have always liked it although I didn't, and still don't, know why 8-) Boyer and Natwick are as good an explanation as any !
I saw it in New York City on a week-long high school educational field trip. Very charming movie. On the same trip our group had passes to a Broadway show, THE APPLE TREE, starring Alan Alda before he became famous. Bill, I hate to say it, but Neil Simon probably is fading from the general public consciousness. I wonder if his name means anything to the great wave of people 30 and younger.
That's a sad thought.
I liked it, too, but since Hanoi Jane is in it I won't see it again.
Well, at least it was made in the pre-Hanoi Jane days.
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