Lonely Guy, The

The Lonely Guy, adapted by Neil Simon from a novel by Bruce Jay Friedman starts off appearing to have the potential to be a Woody Allenish Jewish comedy with Steve Martin as the principal schlemiel but doesn’t deliver despite some good gags

Martin plays Manhattanite greeting card writer Larry Hubbard who returns to his apartment to find his beautiful, nymphomaniacal girlfriend Danielle (Robyn Douglass) in bed with another guy (don't ask how he got such a girlfriend in the first place). She throws him out and while pondering his next move Larry meets Warren (Charles Grodin) who welcomes him to the society of Lonely Guys.  It’s not how he sees himself but gradually the evidence mounts up and Warren is there to commiserate him every step of the sorry way.

If Hiller is no help in the directorial stakes, delivering the script with journeyman-like efficiency, Simon doesn’t do a whole lot with the material, structuring it around the cyclical here-we-go-no we-don’t relationship between Larry and Iris (Judith Ivey) a six-time divorcee who sees Larry’s qualities but thinks that she doesn’t deserve him. The portrayal of this dynamic is completely charmless, depriving the film of any credible underpinning for its gags. 

Some of these jokes zing with black humour (a suicide scene with bodies falling from the Brooklyn Bridge, lonely guys crying out their lost loves names from the tops of buildings, Larry dining in a restaurant alone), some are simply duds (Larry bringing Iris to orgasm multiple times by sneezing, or appearing on the Merv Griffiths show) but there’s not a lot more than padding in the second half, when Larry become a successful author but inexplicably continues to moon over Iris. Martin gives a typically energetic performance that largely carries the film while, disappointingly, Grodin really only plays one note as a chronic sad-sack.

All up, the core idea is sadly funny but the execution is less than it deserves and the film is an intermittently amusing diversion at best.

FYI: Arthur Hiller directed W.C. Fields And Me (1976)  a biopic about a comedian with whose work Martin  was no doubt familiar (and in Fields' younger years, even resembled).

 

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