House Calls

"House Calls" is a wonderful romantic comedy that can best be described as "how they used to make them." It stars Walter Matthau (in one of his best roles) as a recently widowed doctor who goes out on the dating scene again and hits paydirt as he seems to have a different woman every night. He then meets hospital patient Glenda Jackson and soon develops a relationship with her. But it's one that will be severely tested as she informs him she is a one man woman and expects him to be a one woman man.

This is a sweet, very funny film also starring Art Carney as the senile hospital administrator and Richard Benjamin as Matthau's friend and fellow doctor. It's a must see for any Matthau fan or any fan of light comedy.

You won't be disappointed.

Near-wonderful mixture of comedy, romance, and medical chaos has a 50-ish swinging-single doctor, tired of going to rock concerts with nubile airheads, dating a patient his own age whom he met on his rounds. Screenplay by Julius Epstein shows a fair amount of sophistication, though he doesn't have enough material to fill out the picture's last third, and one can almost feel the movie slipping. The subplot about the hospital being investigated for its shoddy business affairs isn't worked out satisfactorily, and it feels highly concocted anyway. Still, Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson are a terrific team, Richard Benjamin and Art Carney very funny in support. Director Howard Zieff keeps it all popping, and even when Epstein's one-liners feel like Neil Simon rejects, Zieff zips right along happily. The results are dryly engaging and occasionally quite sweet. Followed by a failed TV series. *** from ****

Pay no attention to dispeptic, angst-ridden critics who find this kind of fare unfunny and out of favor. (Well, maybe it is out of favor.) Who cares, it's funny. House Calls is a thoroughly enjoyable tale of mis-matched, middle-aged singles working their way toward romance (or a loose approximateion thereof). No car chases, space ships, or wild sex antics here. Instead, a cast of likeable people (Matthau, Jackson, Richard Benjamin, et.al.) and the great Art Carney as one of the more incompetent physicians ever portrayed on screen. The film puts a smile on your face and keeps it there. Ambitious? Of course not. The stuff of sitcoms? Yeah (in fact, it became one). Enjoyable? You bet. This is one of those films that reminds you how much fun it can be simply to sit down and be with old friends.

it is a brilliant film. scene by scene, word by word. not only for the smart script or for great acting - both interesting ingredients of movie but for the real seductive chemistry between the leas actors. sure, it is the Hepburn- Tracy recipes but the taste is different. Glenda Jackson does a remarkable job and Walter Matthau use with grace the small details in his personal manner. charming and clever, old fashion and modern, bottle for the flavor of a kind of lost perfume, it is pure delight. Art Carney is one of splendid pillars of humor and the mixture between couple problems and ethic dilemmas is explored with rare art.

A great, small, simple comedy that works because of the terrific cast. And it's not only Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau but Art Carney and Richard Benjamin. And the story actually works because all the characters are involved. There isn't any arbitrary stories. Matthau meets Jackson because she's made to wear a ridiculous head bandage provided by Carney and Matthau removes it and performs surgery on her. Carney becomes angry/upset over this and blackmails Matthau into supporting him for Chief Resident even though Carney's obviously "crack pot". Jackson and Matthau become lovers but she eventually becomes angry with him for (among other things) not standing up to Carney. That's what makes this an almost perfect film comedy: the characters, plot and situations all seem to spring naturally from the events in the plot. There's nothing forced. And the actors seem to be having a ball.

Matthau and Jackson are superb together.