What About Bob? **** (1991, Bill Murray, Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Hagerty) – Classic Movie Review 8768

Director Frank Oz’s hilarious 1991 crazy comedy What About Bob? is a neatly crafted showcase for the unstoppable comic talents of the Bill Murray-Richard Dreyfuss team.

Endearingly insecure Bob Wiley (Murray), an obsessive-compulsive neurotic who suffers from nearly every phobia known to man, finds life unbearable when his shrink, egotistical New York City psychotherapist Dr Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss), goes on leave. So he tracks him down and follows him to his holiday retreat during his month-long family vacation at a peaceful New Hampshire lakeside cottage. He is there his wife Fay (Julie Hagerty), his son Siggy (Charlie Korsmo) and his daughter Anna (Kathryn Erbe).

What about Bob? is another comedy along the lines of The Dream Team and Crazy People but even funnier than the former and certainly far, far funnier than the latter. Dreyfuss plays the psychotherapist as a fall guy, pushed increasingly close to the end of his tether as his family grows to like his infuriatingly maddening patient.

It starts fast and furious, and admirably, never runs out of steam. Once again, ex-Muppeteer Oz proves just as adept at working with humans in this adaptation of a story by Alvin Sargent and Laura Ziskin, with the screenplay by Tom Schulman.

Also in the cast are Tom Aldredge, Susan Willis, Roger Bowen, Fran Brill, Brian Reddy, Doris Belack, Melinda Mullins and Marcella Lowery.

Charlie Korsmo, the child star of Men Don’t Leave, Hook, The Doctor, Dick Tracy, and Can’t Hardly Wait (1998), is now a Law Professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

RIP Alvin Sargent, who died on May 9, 2019, aged 92. The Ordinary People and Julia Oscar winner also penned three ‘Spider-Man’ films as well as What About Bob? (1991), Other People’s Money (1991) and Unfaithful (2002).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8768

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