Lost in Yonkers ***½ (1993, Richard Dreyfuss, Mercedes Ruehl, Irene Worth) – Classic Movie Review 2008

Director Martha Coolidge’s 1993 movie of Neil Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway show is a straightforward, no-frills theatre-to-film transfer with no particular concessions to the medium of cinema. But the enticingly nostalgic summer of 1942 wartime atmosphere is readily evoked through a lavish show of period artefacts and Simon’s sharp memory for the details of his childhood.

Brad Stoll and Mike Damus play early teenage Bronx boys, Jay and Arty Kurnitz, whose mother Evelyn has recently passed away after a lengthy illness, prompting their widowed father (Jack Laufer) to take a job in the South. So they are sent reluctantly to stay with their equally reluctant Grandma (Irene Worth) and their childlike thirty-something Aunt Bella (Mercedes Ruehl) in Yonkers, New York.

Grandma runs her own candy store, but that doesn’t make things any better for Jay and Arty, who are afraid of her Grandma and have problems relating to the slow-witted Aunt Bella. Into the mix comes Richard Dreyfuss, who plays the boys’ uncle Louie, a gangster’s henchman hiding out from a couple of hoods, who comes into the lives of the family, in a showy, charismatic star turn.

You can see how much better this material might work on stage, and how it could be a worthy Pulitzer Prize-winning play. But still, much of Simon’s witty dialogue and several of the performances grip the attention, particularly that of veteran Worth, relishing making the most of a peach of a part as the stern and crusty family matriarch.

If you feel you are watching a play, that is good enough for those in tune with the good-spirited, warm-hearted Simon mix of wisecracks, melancholia, worldly wisdom and melodrama.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 2008

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