Last of the Red Hot Lovers

What do you expect from Neil Simon except everything! He turns dialogue into chamber music. He is the consummate artist of speech. Yes, he can do plot too - and that's an understatement - but at his best, he is a COMPOSER. This movie is about a homely middle aged man TRYING to have a romance. It is most poignant and painful, with little comic relief. The critics thought it deserved only one star. Critics seem to regard awkward, homely characters as not worthy of depiction, except in comedy. They are also very partial to big budgets with lots of excitement, car chases, etc. Talk is not cinematic? Who said cinema should be cinematic? Life is cinematic enough!

Arkin gives a fine turn as a successful middle-aged middle-class fish restauranteur whose fingers smell of fish and who simply has to get in on this Sexual Revolution he's heard so much about. Thus follows three sequential trysts in his mother's apartment, the first with a the embittered Kellerman, the second with the flighty Prentiss and the final with the depressive Taylor, each ending in its own disastrous way. Arkin does a lot of his frustrated signature shouting and there's a lot of dialogue, but it is a Neil Simon play after all.

The Kellerman sequence is a bit tiresome and her many soliloquies bombastic and preachy. Taylor's vignette was more amusing--if you find bipolarism and melancholia amusing. Her demand that Arkin list three good people belabors the point.

But sandwiched between these two is the Prentiss episode, which is a gem. Prentiss plays the perky, quirky, dope-smoking character to a tee: "I know I'm a goofball but that's part of my charm." Those voice inflections changing 10 times a minute, those eye rolls, those downturned crooked smiles, teeter into the realm of self-parody but we're loving it. And it doesn't hurt at all that she simply looks like a million bucks.

From my many years of watching movies, I can easily tell when a film is originally a play. The way to tell is usually when the main characters either stay in one place, or walk around to many different locations while talking simultaneously. The movies that fall into the latter category appear to try too hard to make viewers forget the story was originally intended for stage, not screen. "Last of the Red Hot Lovers", to its credit, does not try to hide its theatrical roots.

The movie is one of many to be adapted from a play by Neil Simon, who also wrote the script for this film and left very little out. Simon's big screen (writing) successes include "The Odd Couple" (1968), "The Sunshine Boys" (1975 with George Burns and Walter Matthau), and "The Goodbye Girl" (1977). His failures include "The Cheap Detective" (1978) and "The Marrying Man" (1991). Of the 34 films he has written screenplays for (including remakes), "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" falls somewhere in the middle leaning towards the top. It's not bad, but it wasn't quite as well-adapted as the aforementioned great Neil Simon movies that are still iconic. The writing is excellent, but there was something missing just from the film that could have strengthened it greatly.

Alan Arkin plays Barney Cashman, a slightly uptight but well-meaning 45-year-old restaurant owner who is fed up with the monotony of his life. He has been married for 22 years and appears to still love his wife. However, he feels an itch as a jaded aristocratic woman (Sally Kellerman) wishes to engage in an extramarital affair with him. He is overcome with mixed feelings about the ordeal, including the paranoia that comes with being caught. That fear is not helped by the fact that he chooses his mother's Upper East Side apartment as the location of his desired fling, which is also where most of the movie takes place. The same feelings emerge when he attempts affairs with an aspiring singer with a fully fleeting attention span (Paula Prentiss) and a friend's wife who is convinced her husband is also having an affair (Renee Taylor).

This is a smart comedy, but not one that you can enjoy by watching passively. There is no leaving your brain at the door, which may be why this film could be considered an acquired taste. It is dialogue-heavy with a hint of slapstick or physical humor from time to time. That physical humor comes mostly from Arkin's compulsive tics such as smelling his fingers (for traces of fish) or wiping off his potential fingerprints from whatever he touches in his mother's apartment. There were probably many actors who would overdo such actions, or intentionally fall over themselves to get a cheap laugh. Fortunately, Arkin resists these urges, and manages to appear realistically uptight instead of acting nerdy like a Jerry Lewis character.

The comedy mostly comes from the dialogue, which is why you will need a sharp attention span to catch most of the humor here. Of the three objects of Barney Cashman's artificial affections here, I thought Paula Prentiss did the best job. Not only does she look great in this film, but her character is over the top without being too in-your-face. She's just a notch below Gilda Radner's Judy Miller character from the early days of "Saturday Night Live". Men who are turned on by women's legs will also not be disappointed when seeing her on screen (hey, it's the guy in me talking).

I thought Kellerman did well for her part, although I still don't know why she wanted to have an affair with Barney Cashman yet still seem uninterested in him. Taylor made a great antithesis to both Kellerman and Prentiss as the suburban wife who feels wronged, but is not sure in the end if two wrongs actually do make a right. Her character especially works when Arkin realizes what he was trying to find in these artificial relationships, and what he actually did find.

The characters were flawless, and the dialogue, although sometimes firing at a speed that allowed little time for a laugh, was witty and interesting. The major weakness of the movie was the fact that Arkin's often-referred-to wife was never shown on film. You hear her voice, and see her figure under bed blankets, but never does the camera eye glance upon her. Such a gimmick has been done in other films before, but this is one of the many times it doesn't work. By not showing the wife, the audience doesn't have much of an idea of the guilt and sexual tension Barney Cashman feels. Cashman is a good guy about to commit an act that could ruin his marriage and his life, but the audience doesn't know on what exactly he's missing out. Such tension existed in films about extramarital affairs like "The Woman In Red" (1984) or "Jungle Fever" (1991) because you saw the wife and got a general feeling for what kind of person she was. In this movie, she's a wallflower.

With a title like "Last of the Red Hot Lovers", one would also think it would be a bit more risqué. Of course, the fact that there is no gratuitous sex is what makes the film's title so ironic, but there could have been a bit more enlightening dialogue about such topics. Even though it's rated PG, I doubt kids would want to see it, so why not make it more for adults?

"Last of the Red Hot Lovers" is good, but just need some more tweaking to make it great. Still, its strengths lay in its characters, especially the underrated Alan Arkin (before winning an Oscar, of course) and Paula Prentiss. Anyone bored with the dialogue can always rent a "Three Stooges" movie, but those willing to hold on to their brains while watching a comedy should keep this film in mind.

Neil Simon scripted this film version of his play, in which an almost constantly flustered Alan Arkin plays Barney Cashman. Barney is a middle-aged owner of a fish restaurant who feels rather dissatisfied with his ordinary life. He mistakenly thinks that the way to inject some spice is to have an extramarital affair, and as fate would have it, his mothers' apartment is vacant one afternoon a week. He meets with a succession of women whom he tries his mightiest to seduce: Elaine (Sally Kellerman), a cynical, unemotional sexpot with a very direct approach, Bobbi (Paula Prentiss), an air head, obnoxious entertainer, and his own friend Jeanette (Renee Taylor), a cuckolded wife suffering from melancholia.

Directed by Gene Saks, this never really comes off as cinema but more a photographed play, even with a number of outside shots. As such, it's very reliant on characterization and dialogue, and it proves to be fairly watchable. The performances, especially from Arkin, are basically stage performances that come across as over the top on film. And it's kind of hard to care all that much about this average-Joe schmuck in the lead role, and why he feels so compelled to cheat on his wife. The sequence with Kellerman tends to be the most amusing; she's fantastic in her role. Prentiss is a little much; her character could definitely be annoying to some viewers. Taylor is fine, but this woman she's playing will likely be a matter of personal taste: can a miserable person with self-esteem issues be all that funny under these circumstances?

Simon, of course, does come up with some entertaining lines of dialogue, and admittedly, Arkins' reaction to getting "stoned" is a hoot as Prentiss convinces him to try marijuana.

Fans of Simon and the cast will likely be a lot more forgiving than the average viewer.

Six out of 10.

Based on one of many Neil Simon plays that occur within a single room with varied vignettes, this one concerns a man (Arkin) who wakes up and decides that his life is too dull and safe and needs some spark in it. So he daringly and trepidatiously uses his mother's one-room apartment to set up a series of afternoon liaisons with women he finds desirable and each of the trysts has unexpected and mostly comic results. First he meets up with Kellerman, a jaded, sophisticated bitch who has lost most of her feelings, but still enjoys the sensation of sex. Next up is wacky Prentiss, who babbles on endlessly while displaying signs of what this generation calls ADHD and inventing all sorts of possibly-imagined drama for herself. Finally, he invites troubled, married Taylor, who is enduring her own husband's infidelity and wants to pay him back. By the time Arkin has dealt with this trio of misfits, he discovers things about himself that he hadn't originally realized. It goes without saying that the production is stagy in the extreme. The set even contains the ever-present (and much loathed by experienced theatre critics) couch DEAD CENTER in the playing area. Attempts have been made to "open up" the story slightly and extend the ladies' parts a bit, but this only draws attention to the main playing area and the repetition of it all. Arkin gives a fully-committed, deeply thought-out performance in a role that really showcases the female roles more than his own. He, however, isn't always delightful to listen to as he pontificates and screams with regularity. Kellerman is perfect for her part and has some funny throwaway lines (notably after she coughs for an eternity and then asks for something besides water afterwards.) Prentiss also performs admirably in a role that requires a particular brand of nuttiness. Her unusual vocalisms probably would be better suited to the stage, but the whole project is better suited to the stage. Taylor is probably the least endearing of the three, even though her character is likely meant to be the most sympathetic. She, like everyone in the cast - right down to the bit players - seems to be portraying the most strident and grating aspects of a New Yorker. It would almost count as an insult to the people of NYC were it not a project written and directed (and mostly acted!) by true blue New Yorkers! So it had to be intentional. Arkin's voice often sounds exactly like Jerry Seinfeld's. There's a reason that "Seinfeld" was just a half hour long and that he never starred in any films. A person can only take so much. That may be why a little of this film, even though it has some very amusing content at times, goes a long way. By the time Taylor shows up, it's already overstayed its welcome.