
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
Everything that I loved about IRMA LA DOUCE, the whimsy, the lightheartedness and the optimistic outlook is missing from today’s PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE, based on a play by Neil Simon and starring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft.
I won’t say it’s a bad movie because of it, though. There is a certain optimism to the film, but it’s not the main focus.

Basically you have a man reaching his breaking point. Lemmon plays Mel, a long-suffering corporate man in New York. He can’t stand his apartment (which always seems to be in some form of disrepair… cracks in the walls, water not working, elevator not working, noisy sexpot German stewardesses living next door, etc), he is in constant fear of losing his job, he’s not close to his family… the only thing that keeps him grounded is his wife, Edna (Bancroft).
When Lemmon loses his job something snaps and he goes from Grumpy Bastard to Almost Insane Fucker. That balance is tipped when, after weeks of job hunting while his wife gets a job to support them, their place is robbed and he gets a faceful of water from an upstairs neighbor sick of him screaming obscenities out on his balcony.
That takes Lemmon from still being the likable, but grumpier version of the actor we all love to love to a wild-eyed conspiracy theory-spewing madman.
I don’t like that guy. I like my Lemmon nice and sane!

I can’t hold that against him, though. He is an actor afterall and I did enjoy his “I’m Mad As Hell And I’m Not Gonna Take It Anymore!” performance to a degree. I think I was a little let down in just how stage-bound it felt. IRMA LA DOUCE doesn’t really take place in many outdoor spaces, but they successfully made that movie feel cinematic whereas Melvin Frank directed a movie that felt like it could have been made for TV.
The film does feel like a PBS special in some degrees, minus a great scene in Central Park where Jack Lemmon chases down a youth he thinks stole his wallet (played by a very young Sylvester Stallone) that is a lot of fun and genuinely funny.
Bancroft is the real winner her. She has so much to play with and doesn’t always make the easy decision in scenes. She gets angry at her husband, but never loses the love. She’s trying to so hard to bring him back from the brink of insanity, always wearing her love for him like a mask. She gets pissed, she gets fed-up, she gets scared, but never makes the exact choices you expect someone to make in those situations. There are always layers and depth to her dialogue and delivery.

Simon’s play just might not be my favorite of his works. I love how he plays with sanity vs. insanity and how he parallels Lemmon’s recovery with Bancroft’s slow descent, but something just didn’t click for me in the story. It could just be Frank’s visual decisions that kept me from completely enjoying this movie, but I think the overall story isn’t one that I’m attracted to. I much prefer his more crazy satires like MURDER BY DEATH.
I mentioned earlier that Sly makes an early appearance in this film and it’s great. He plays a victim, essentially, and it’s really fun to see him before he was the quiet tough badass or even the lovable lug from Rocky. This film has many early appearances by known people, including F. Murray Abraham early on in the flick as a cabbie and M. Emmet Walsh, one of my favorite character actors, as the snarky doorman at the apartment complex where Lemmon and Bancroft live.
Final Thoughts: I’d definitely say this film is better than mediocre, but I could never engage with the characters on the screen. I always felt like I was watching a screen, not looking through a window into another world. Some of that might be the cinematography, the angles, the long takes and some of it might be the overall story being told. As an actor’s showcase, this is strong stuff, but I think it’s a tale more suitable for the stage than the big screen.

Here are the final run of A Movie A Day titles:
Saturday, January 3rd: THE GOODBYE GIRL (1977)

Sunday, January 4th: LOST IN YONKERS (1993)

Monday, January 5th: THE SUNSHINE BOYS (1975)

Tuesday, January 6th: CALIFORNIA SUITE (1978)

Wednesday, January 7th: A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977)

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com









