Same Time, Next Year *** (1978, Alan Alda, Ellen Burstyn) – Classic Movie Review 11,475

Director Robert Mulligan’s 1978 American romantic comedy-drama film Same Time, Next Year stars Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn, and is based on the 1975 Broadway and London West End hit play by Bernard Slade, who also writes the screenplay.

Burstyn won a Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical (tied with Maggie Smith for California Suite). It was nominated for four Oscars: Best Actress, Best Screenplay from Another Medium, Best Cinematography (Robert Surtees) and Best Original Song (‘The Last Time I Felt Like This’)

Two married people with kids enjoy cosy adulterous meetings in an extramarital affair across 25 years of US history: a cute comedy idea. The film has six episodes, about five years apart.

Doris (Ellen Burstyn), a 24-year-old housewife from Oakland, Alameda County, California, meets George (Alan Alda), a 27-year-old accountant from The Garden State of New Jersey at dinner at an inn on California’s Mendocino County coast in 1951 and they have a sexual tryst, and then agree to meet once a year.

Burstyn engagingly repeats her stage role as Doris, who moves from Fifties innocence to Women’s Lib, and she finds an ideal screen partner in Alda as George.

Mulligan’s handling is a bit stiff and stagy, but no matter, the movie still pleases. And certainly the two stars please. Their expert, appealing, amusing performances delight.

Exteriors were shot at the Heritage House Inn, a resort and bed and breakfast in Little River, California, seven miles south of Mendocino, California. The shell of the cottage was built on a temporary foundation overlooking the Pacific Ocean, but the interior was filmed on the Universal Studios sound stage in Los Angeles.

The Broadway production opened on 14 March 1975, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre with Ellen Burstyn as Doris and Charles Grodin as George and closed on 3 September 1978, playing 1,453 performances. The London production starring Michael Crawford and Frances Cuka opened in 1976 at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

Bernard Slade said: ‘I felt I was writing a fantasy. Then I started to get letters from people that had had this sort of relationship. I saw the French production, the Spanish production. In France, how excited could they get about an extramarital affair? The only things they didn’t quite understand were the psychiatric references.’

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,475

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