Odd Couple

By Frank Rich

HOUSE CALLS Directed by Howard Zieff Screenplay by Max Shulman and Julius J. Epstein, Alan Mandel and Charles Shyer

Dr. Charley Nichols (Walter Matthau) is a gruff but adorable middle-aged widower who wants to score with every young woman he can find. Ann Atkinson (Glenda Jackson) is a wisecracking but adorable divorcee who wants to find a monogamous man and live happily ever after. House Calls is the story of this odd couple's on-again, off-again, on-again romance, and it wants very much to be a Neil Simon comedy. It doesn't succeed, but there are times when this amiable film could pass as a Plaza Suite, or even a Chapter Two, clone.

Four screenwriters are credited with House Calls, and they do make with the jokes. There are marriage jokes and baseball jokes and drag jokes and hospital jokes. The worst lines are about sex; this may be the first film in years that stoops to making cracks about water beds. The funniest scenes--and there should have been more of them--take on the American medical profession. In the rude manner of Paddy Chayefsky's Hospital, House Calls suggests that doctors spend more time thinking about tax shelters and fancy cars than surgical procedures or professional ethics. The film's one outright hilarious character, played with vaudevillian relish by Art Carney, is a chief of surgery so senile that he says good morning to empty hospital stairwells.

On occasion House Calls gets a fast comic beat going, only to have its plot bring the laughs to an abrupt halt. The screenwriters have not found a way to integrate their hero's hospital shenanigans with the love story, and they build their narrative around the kind of forced farcical coincidences that went out of style with I Love Lucy. Howard Zieff, the talented director of Slither and Hearts of the West, works diligently to paper over the rough spots; he is an enviably good craftsman. Yet even he cannot rescue House Calls once it starts to become heartwarming. When a romantic montage concludes with Ann and Charley walking along a deserted beach, the movie becomes as gooey as You Light Up My Life.

House Calls' biggest drawback, however, is the lack of chemistry between its two stars. In principle Matthau and Jackson sound like a Tracy-Hepburn love match, but in practice they don't give off many sparks. Matthau's performance is a less vibrant version of the character he played in Pete 'n' Tillie; he gets his laughs, but he doesn't command the screen. Jackson, though handed an opportunity ro run away with the film, merely tries to charm the audience to death.

A few more parts like this, and she too will begin to look like a clone -- of Julie Andrews.

--Frank Rich

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