The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 27

yr--yr nny r'w-rf www wvr The Boston Globe Saturday, December 20, 1975 27 3 Film version of 'unhine Boys' opens at Cheri i xfS it Ft The uncle quips, "Let's meet somewhere else." Later Ben says, "The only time I get chest pains is here on Tuesdays," Uncle's rancid quip: "So come Wednesdays." This isn't humor, it's embroidery. Matthau and Burns give good performances, and Richard Benjamin is fine as their go-between. But "The Sunshine Boys," like other Neil Simon comedies silver-screened, doesn't have an honest streak of light in it. 1) ful, notably jokes at the expense of senility. The script is full of Simon's boomerang specialty, gags that repeat (not unlike indigestion).

Example: Ben has a very hard time with his uncle, who is mean-spirited, intractable and ungrateful. The old man's immovability literally causes Ben pains in his chest. Dur-. ing one of his weekly visits to the old man's apartment, Ben says, "I get chest pains whenever I come up here." brought together by Clark's-nephew, Ben, a theatrical agent, who persuades them to do a television special on the history of comedy. The reunion becomes a running battle of steady put-downs and niggling insults.

And, somehow, at base, it's oddly offensive. Old age is mocked with malice, or so it seems. Simon would protest, I'm sure, that he 'means it otherwise. Anyway, I found most of it unfunny and some of it pain top-of-the-bill comedy team, Lewis and Clark, The Sunshine Boys. They worked together 43 years during which they came to dislike, if not despise, each other, mostly because Clark gradually took offense at some of -Lewis's on-stage tactics, like Lewis nearly circling a hole in his heart by constantly poking him in the chest or, perhaps worse, deliberately spitting in his face.

Now, retired and out of contact, they are the last time I saw a Neil Simon play turned into a movie, "The Prisoner of Second Avenue," I wondered, in print what happened to the laughs Simon -was able to get on Broadway that made them so hapless and unfunny in' a movie. Now, with "The Sunshine Boys," I'm still wondering. While there is some humor here, mostly in the sarcastic stand-off between two old vaudevil- KEVIN KELLY lians who loathe, but sometimes love, each other, this is a pitiless and dreary movie callously directed by Herbert Ross but played with something like glum vigor by Walter Matthau and George Burns, as the geriatric vaudevillians. Matthau, who plays the character named Willy Clark, and Burns, who "plays Al Lewis, were once a Jim and Lee Cooke (front) and Laura Solet in "The Calvin Coolidge Follies" at the Charles Playhouse Cabaret. I WHERE TO GO IN THE GREATER BOSTON AREA MBfi(l EBBS Ti, 1 YrV.ri4rirai-m il international TJ 1 'ST 7 i inii -dm jgr T2t.

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