No such nasty stuff would ever rear its head in this Neil Simon Broadway comedy, which the playwright himself adapted for film. In the Simon-verse, not only is everybody fundamentally nice, but everyone from the leads to the walk-on bit players have an inexhaustible supply of quips and one-liners. No conversational dullards exist in Simon plays or movies.......even the telephone repairman, when he arrives, comes equipped with both phones and gags....
And the BQ wouldn't have it any other way, especially in this movie, our favorite frothy Simon-ized quip-fest. We hug this one for its simple, basic, primal rom-com mission.....,to insure that our comically mis-matched young lovers finish the movie with a big smoocheroo....to the sustained applause of random bystanders.
50 years after its release, we do amuse ourselves by contemplating the backstory here.....as in: what would lead free-spirited, pleasure-loving bohemian Corie (Jane Fonda) to marry straight-laced conservative lawyer Paul (Robert Redford) in the first place? Their honeymoon, a solid week of marathon, Olympic sex at the Plaza Hotel, certainly implies physical compatibility......but we can't help wondering why a sybaritic sprite like Corie wouldn't just hop on the back of Peter Fonda's motorcycle and head off to find America along with unlimited biker bonking......(of course we know the answer......Paul may be a stick-in-the-mud.....but holy crap, he's Robert Friggin' Redford....)
But then, if Corie disappeared in a cloud of weed and Harley exhaust, we wouldn't have a movie to enjoy.....watching these two bat countless Simon gag lines back and forth like a two hour verbal ping pong tournament.....aided and abetted by movie Golden Age veterans Mildred Natwick and Charles Boyer. A warm, fuzzy fantasy world, we know....but who wouldn't want to visit an alternate reality where true love triumphs and every word out of your mouth is funny?
As a genre, the romantic comedy has stymied today's filmmakers, who've tried to freshen up the boy-meets-girl blueprint with ever increasing amounts of dysfunction, anger and ridiculous plot twists........as for the BQ, call us old fashioned (or as Beloved Daughter does, just plain old)....we'll take the simple, sweet pleasures of "Barefoot In The Park" every time...4 romantic stars (****).....now cue the gushing music with a happy chorus singing the theme song......
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