Scappo dalla città - La vita, l'amore e le vacche

Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) is frustrated with his job selling ad time on the radio. Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern) is in a hateful marriage and found cheating with the checkout girl. Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby) is settling down with an underwear model. The three friends decide to go on a getaway driving cattle. There they meet the beautiful Bonnie Rayburn (Helen Slater) who just was recently dumped, father & son dentists, Barry & Ira ice cream makers, and the harden trail boss Curly (Jack Palance).

What makes this work is the chemistry between the three good comedic talents, and Jack Palance playing up his rough cowboy act. It has a sweet heart and Billy Crystal making jokes when he was still funny. It has some really funny insightful mid-life-crisis guy talk. And Jack Palance delivers some funny memorable punchlines.

Billy Crystal does a great job in this, and I'm really not a big fan either,, I'm more of a Jack Palance fan, by the way he was great as the trail boss.. I don't know what I would do if I had the money and two weeks off, cattle drive,, maybe not so much , but the movie provides an interesting premise for us guys in their late 30's early 40's . 3 men with jobs in the city , work their butt's off for a year and save up their vacation time to go on a cattle drive,, and in two weeks,, try to find themselves as men,, as each one of them has something different that he wants to accomplish. but the main thing is that they all have fun doing it,, along the way the meet "Curly" ,, Jack Palance as the trail boss,, I don't know why he wasn't in the whole movie,, but that's another subject all together,, my favorite character however without a doubt was little "Norman" the cow,, excellent funny movie,, love the river chase scene, this is one of those movies that I can watch once or twice every year and not get tired of it .

Few other comedic filmmakers understand the west on a comedic, farcical level than Ron Underwood. Just a year before directing City Slickers, Underwood directed one of my favorite contemporary comedy/horror films, Tremors, about a small, rather unpopulated town in Nevada being literally swallowed by mutant, underground worms. The film was not just fun to watch, but fun to imagine that deep underground there are large, unearthly worms that have remained undetected by elaborate seismographs and are now resurfacing to swallow anything that could cause a detectable vibration underground. Needless to say, after watching it when I was eight, I took extra-quiet steps.

And here's City Slickers, a comedy that uses the wild west as a background for numerous visual gags, snappy wordplay, and a trio of great performances. The three guys are Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), a radio advertiser who is experiencing his midlife crisis after turning thirty-nine, Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern), who is stuck in a sexless marriage in the midst of managing a grocery store, and Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby), a womanizer uncomfortable with the notion that there is a time to "settle down." On his birthday, Mitch is given a present from his two buds which is a vacation down on a southern cattle drive. Reluctantly, he accepts, and before they know it, they are defending the cattle drive in true western fashion.

Billy Crystal is an ideal character for Mitch. He has the right balance of comedic wit and dramatic potency to make a character like this work well on the basis of being a sadsack but also a compelling lead. Stern and Kirby work well in the supporting characters, mainly because they themselves have good comedic timing and work well off of Crystal's lead.

City Slickers works better than another western farce by the name of Three Amigos, which was stunningly mediocre in its inclusion of three hilarious comedians - Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short - and successfully finding nothing interesting to do with them. The film drifted from one stale setup to another, falling flat on its face, before stumbling over to the next contrived setup and doing the same. Too many instances in the film were dry and the laugh to actor ration was surprisingly very low.

City Slickers works because writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel know how to effectively utilize their talent and give each character sustainable depth and energy to run for the near-two hour runtime the film holds. In that time, the film is often funny, kind of poignant, a little overlong, but heartfelt all the more. It's some kind of minor miracle this was well-received by a general public.

Starring: Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby. Directed by: Ron Underwood.

This movie is for anyone who needs relief from a crisis, middle-aged or otherwise.

Three buddies head down the trails to relieve their midlife crises. They wind up sharing the adventures of a lifetime. I have enjoyed this movie each and every time I have seen it. The comedy is pleasant, and you will not exhale during the river rescue scene. *** out of ****

The first time I saw this film I thought it was a piece of wasted Hollywood fluff. Then I watched it again for some reason and liked it a little more. The third time I watched this film I became hooked. City Slickers is wonderful fun. Billy Crystal is perfect in the mid-life crisis role and Jack Palance has been waiting for this part his whole career. Ron Underwood did a great job with this one. It seemed cliched at first, then I realized it is a great original piece of comedy film-making.