Screen

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...

...In the background of the wedding scene after he escorts another young woman to her seat, there is an instant before the cut-away when we see him suddenly plunge into the pew after her...

...The occasion is the dinner for the governor at which the other guest is a black lawyer on Ira's staff...

...Only certain situations lend themselves to the kind of three-ring circus I find funny on the screen...

...Say good-bye to me, audience...

...Once the chaos gets to that stage, all it takes to put me over the edge is some little detail...

...Neil Simon's Seems Like Old Times has almost as many party scenes as All Night Long...

...There is an allusion intended by Simon's title, which refers not only to the renewal of Glenda's relationship with Nick, but also to the kind of comedy that was king in Hollywood in the thirties-the comedy of movies like Bringing Up Baby...

...She's a lawyer too, a public defender who gets off her underprivileged clients by promising to give them jobs...

...The line did me in...

...Chevy Chase has enough physical dexterity to steal any scene he's in with just the sort of by-play I find hilarious...

...now married to Glenda-the film convenes them for the first time at a cocktail party...

...The wonderful thing about a party is that it has lots of chances for distractions, irrelevancies, interruptions, and confusion...

...Such characters have to be done quickly, in a few, brief appearances, so they never have a chance to grow into anyone too complexly human to be funny...

...It's a look that hints at congenital idiocy, at a personality resulting, perhaps, from a little incest somewhere along the family line...

...When that gorilla went crashing into the pew after that girl, I was a goner...

...Since comedy is based on stereotypes, on characters who can be reduced to monomanias like the sex-crazed lineman in Semi-Tough, the minor roles often provide a comedy writer with his best material...

...A scene has to have at least a half-dozen separate actions going on together before any one of them can set me off...

...To which a member of the servant classes sharing the compartment replies, his deference still intact, "Oh, would you, sir...

...But again, a lot of the kicks in the movie come from the sidekicks...

...The climax of this lunatic liberalism conies when Ira and Nick, who've been avoiding each other around the house, finally nieet...

...The relationship between Freddie and his father George has a lot of comic potential from the start, when George steals Freddie's mistress Cheryl (Barbra Streisand...

...Sidekicks often provide the side shows that put me out of control...

...Their best moment comes when Glenda storms out of a room, and on the other side of the slammed door we hear them attacking her wildly, barking and yapping as she protests, "It's me, Glenda...

...Poor Glenda...

...This he's accomplished...

...An incidental gag, a bit of by-play, a momentary side show, an understated line, a routine meant to be caught only in my peripheral vision-something like this is what always, finally, reduces me to hysterics...

...I noticed early in the film that Freddie is a boy with powerful appetites, for he drinks a gallon of juice and downs stacks of toast while casually chatting with his dad at breakfast one morning...

...That was it...

...The most common situation is a party, which is the ideal opportunity for the filmmakers to assemble all the characters, each trailing his own sub-plot behind him...

...It means while Freddie shovels in the scampi, I choke on my popcorn...

...After he passes the first course around the dining table, Ira, Glenda, and the black lawyer, who are barely able to contain themselves at the sight of Nick, ask to be excused and follow him back into the kitchen...

...Now I know what the term "gag" means...

...In Jean-Claude Tramont's All Night Long, the closest Gene Hackman comes to having a sidekick is having a teenage son, Freddie, played by Dennis Quaid...

...I still remember fondly Bryan Forbes's 1966 comedy The Wrong Box because of one moment in it when a gentleman who has been delivering a monologue to fellow passengers on a train (a monologue which has continued right through a train wreck) at last say s, as if nothing had happened, "Well, I really must be going...

...Quaid always seems to have a slightly cross-eyed look...

...The theatrical sit-coms Simon usually writes are what have replaced the old Hollywood style in recent years, but Simon obviously wants to show us he can work in that style, too...

...Her chauffeur, for instance, is an irresistible black delinquent, a parody of Rochester who hotrods around in her car, wolfs down canapes when he serves at her parties, and takes swigs from the wine bottles intended for the dinner guests...

...When Nick comes to her on the lam, she hides him over the garage in the same spirit in which she takes in the dogs, and with the same irritable response from Ira...

...I was therefore not surprised when Freddie accompanies Cheryl's husband to a showdown with George at a restaurant where George is working as a singing waiter, and as the husband shouts at George, who is trying to sing, Freddie begins to gobble down an order of shrimp scampi oh George's tray...

...This also strikes us as a pregnant implication, since Freddie and George are related to Cheryl as well as each other (she's some sort of cousin, I think...

...I was gone again, out in the aisle rolling around clutching my sides...

...One of the ushers is a Reynolds sidekick, a defensive lineman whose character has been established earlier when Reynolds has to talk him out of dropping his date at a party off a roof...

...Even movies that I don't find generally funny can sometimes sneak up on me if they can get enough goofiness like this going in one scene...

...Dogs and ex-husbands aren't all she takes in, though...

...The otherwise unmemorable Semi-Tough, a football comedy done several years ago with Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh, and Kris Kristofferson, will always stay with me because of one deft gesture made during the wedding scene that climaxes the film...

...Everybody she helps treats her this way...

...In one scene where the rest of him is hidden under a bed, his hands alone supply the giggles...

...Needless to say, Freddie is on hand as well...

...Like Nick when he's hiding under the bed, the dogs sometime play only a very oblique role in a scene...

...At least six or eight of these are dogs that the big-hearted Glenda, much to Ira's chagrin, has given a home...

...This is very appropriate on the face of a character who has just lost his mistress to his own father...

...There, as Ira fumes, Glenda frets, and the dogs, being no fools, lie low, Nick cordially sticks out his hand to the black lawyer and says, "Ira, glad to meet you...

...Nick's handshake with the black lawyer is the very essence of what' 'screwball'' means in the term "screwball comedy...

...The climax comes some days later when Glenda and Ira give the governor of the state a dinner party at which, to their disbelief, Nick serves the meal...

...W. D. Richter's script for All Night Long is an endless whirl of parties and little family get-togethers ranging from a funeral to a late supper which George catches his wife and her divorce lawyer sharing in their underwear...

...I laughed so hard, I banged my head on the seat in front of me...

...After introducing all the principals individually-Nick (Chevy Chase), who's kidnapped and forced to rob a bank a la Patty Hearst, Glenda (Goldie Hawn), who is Nick's ex-wife,'and Ira (Charles Grodin), a D.A...

...The chauffeur, who was supposed to serve, has passed out, so Nick, who's snuck into the kitchen, decides to take his place...