Fresh and Exciting

Absolutely Fantastic

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blistering performances.

House Calls is a nice romantic comedy about two mature people finding each other the second time around. Of course both Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson have spent a lot of time looking especially Matthau.Matthau is a doctor at Kensington General Hospital in Los Angeles who is just back from a leave of absence for a few months. He's a widower and after the proper mourning period has gone a nice hedonistic binge in Hawaii and is now back. He spots Jackson as a patient at the hospital and sees what he considers an egregious wrong done by her doctor. Matthau corrects it and earns the wrath of the chief surgeon Art Carney.Jackson is a divorcee with a teenage son who left her husband because she was tired of him pursuing as she puts it 'the all American humping record'. They're different people but Jackson and Matthau hit it off even though the road to romance has a few potholes.House Calls is as much a romantic comedy as a satire on American medicine. It's a subject that Matthau and Jackson have very diametrically opposed views. Jackson thinks that all doctor ought to be Albert Schweitzer and that just doesn't happen in the real world.No budding Schweitzers at Kensington General. Art Carney is absolutely brilliant as the over aged Chief of Surgery who is having touches of senility, but won't retire. Funny, but a bit frightening as well. I suspect there are more Carneys out there than one would like to admit.Some of the other staff includes as doctors Richard Benjamin, Gordon Jump, and Dick O'Neill. Candice Azzara has a juicy role as a widow wanting to sue for malpractice on the death of her husband. Guess who gets the dirty job to woo her a bit?House Calls succeeds quite nicely as romance and satire not an easy combination to pull off.

I may be stretching it a bit to rate this film six stars. And it gets that rating mostly for the fine performance of Art Carney as Dr. Amos Willoughby. Glenda Jackson is good as Ann Atkinson. While Walter Matthau isn't bad as Dr. Charley Nichols, his character is missing the zip he usually brings to comedy. I think that may be due to a very weak screenplay. For a comedy, this one is quite lame, with little humor other than an occasional smile. The romance is the best part as Charley settles down and gets very comfortable with Ann. One can see and sense that happening in a middle-aged couple that hit it off. I think Matthau is supposed to be playing an MD a few years younger than his true 58 years here. Jackson is about on target as a 42-year old divorcée. The humor in the hospital was so-so. A good screenplay could have made much more out of this. Again, with the march of time, movies about ineptitude and incompetence of hospital staff, doctors especially, aren't likely to set too well with most audiences of today.

Near-wonderful mixture of comedy, romance, and medical chaos has a 50-ish swinging-single doctor, tired of going to rock concerts with nubile airheads, dating a patient his own age whom he met on his rounds. Screenplay by Julius Epstein shows a fair amount of sophistication, though he doesn't have enough material to fill out the picture's last third, and one can almost feel the movie slipping. The subplot about the hospital being investigated for its shoddy business affairs isn't worked out satisfactorily, and it feels highly concocted anyway. Still, Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson are a terrific team, Richard Benjamin and Art Carney very funny in support. Director Howard Zieff keeps it all popping, and even when Epstein's one-liners feel like Neil Simon rejects, Zieff zips right along happily. The results are dryly engaging and occasionally quite sweet. Followed by a failed TV series. *** from ****

Walter Matthau is best remembered for the long series of comedies he did with his equal comedy partner Jack Lemmon from THE FORTUNE COOKIE to THE ODD COUPLE II. But people tend to forget that in the late 1970s he appeared with another partner in two films - a female partner. This was Glenda Jackson, the English double Oscar winner, who demonstrated her comic abilities against Matthau's first in HOUSE CALLS and then in HOPSCOTCH. Matthau's role was slightly larger in both films, because his characters were more central to the plots, but the chemistry between them was quite good. If you ever want to see two pros demonstrating how sexual intercourse can be crazily funny watch Walter and Glenda as Dr. Charley Nicholson and Ann Atkinson experimenting to see if two people could have sex on a bed under the old movie code rule of the two parties each having one leg on the floor! Never has sex been looked at from such a clinical and mechanical point of view.Matthau's Charlie has just been widowed before the film began. He has only had one woman in his life - his wife. So now he's the eligible bachelor. He also is the leading surgeon in the hospital he works out of, but the chief surgeon is Dr. Amos Weatherby (Art Carney). Carney is apparently senile (there are moments later in the film that show he turns his senility on and off - see the scene where he rams Richard Benjamin's car). Amos is up for re-election (Charlie is his closest competitor for the post - if he wants it). However, Amos manages to convince Charlie to let him keep the job for reasons of self-esteem.One day Charlie notices Ann in the hospital. She has had a slight accident and is resting in bed, but Amos has put her into a cage like apparatus (which Charlie remarks has not been used since about 1920). He gets her out of the device, and soon is romancing her. She joins the staff of the hospital, but she is critical of Charlie's willingness to cater to Amos, and she is critical of certain selfish tendencies she sees among the doctors in the hospital.Amos' bungling causes the death of a wealthy patron of the hospital (Lloyd Gough), who owned a baseball team (his greatest innovation being separate admission costs for double headers). Amos tries to calm down the young widow of the team owner, delivering the eulogy at the burial service (the line in the summary above is the peroration line of the eulogy). However she is still determined to sue (her lawyer Thayer David says the hospital is the most incompetent he's ever seen). So Amos suggests that Charlie romance the widow to satisfy her from that expensive lawsuit. But how will Ann react to this? The film is quite amusing, and was so successful that besides causing a sequel for Jackson and Matthau, it led to a television series as well.