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Shaw's concept of Hell, the perpetual holiday laid bare as "a Comedy about Life, Death and Freedom." Poolside snapshots and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" through a jazzy filter establish the boys in their habitat, a chum's funeral gets them out into the open. Middle-aged Long Island blokes (Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes, Peter Falk) in mourning, the therapeutic carouse is a desperate escape, anywhere but back home. Athletic nostalgia in basketball courts and swimming pools, "they got no excuses, and they feel good and they get sweaty." "You know, you have a beer, and you're with guys you like," everybody's got a song, the poor barfly gets swatted over and over. One's camaraderie game is another's cruel bullying, blasting guffaws segue into lavatory retching. "American bluntness," someone calls it, Cassavetes stretches it into transcendent excruciation. (In his obsessive insistence on the moment with no short cuts, he is a true heir of Stroheim.) Chardin visages fill the screen at the tavern, at the agency a still-life finds Gazzara's noggin shrunken in the background and gigant baby pictures in the foreground next to a yellow ashtray. "Lies and tensions. That'll kill you before cancer in the heart." The fantasy getaway is a rain-soaked London, in their own minds tuxedo-clad swells scooping up girlies at the casino. The hotel room date strikes an unexpected rhyme with The Odd Couple, the great sketch at the dentist's office goes into The In-Laws, with Falk. "If we're making too much noise for you, just let us know." Wounded and wounding, exhausting and exhilarating, a full humanistic terror, relentlessly visceral. The gentle punchline sees the crying daughter and the angry wife at the end of the bleary adventure. With Jenny Runacre, Jenny Lee Wright, Noelle Kao, John Kullers, Meta Shaw Stevens, Leola Harlow, Delores Delmar, and Eleanor Zee.
--- Fernando F. Croce |