Two Manhattan sublessees meet, fight, and finally fall for one another — a supposedly heart-warming romance written in Neil Simon's glib, unctuous, hard-sell style. Simon certainly knows the rules of the Well-Made Play and that rat-a-tat rhythm of wisecracks and comebacks; he has a ready fund — as big as his bank account — of jokes about New York and the legit theater; and he possesses a true, sympathetic feeling for people's individual kinks. (Richard Dreyfuss plays an avant-garde actor, which somewhat excuses his habitual fussing and fuming; Marsha Mason, Simon's real-life wife, is an upstanding representative of middle-classness; and Quinn Cummings, an owlish little girl, is as precocious as any Henry James juvenile.) There seems to be a lot of knowingness compressed into every Simon one-liner, and yet there is always a kind of hurry to change the subject, which acts as a disclaimer, a dismissal. Simon likes to hit and run. He would be ideally suited to the treadmill working conditions of a TV series, if only there were enough money in it. Directed by Herbert Ross. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.