While fishing on a San Diego beach, Gerald Clamson catches… a sea diver! Even more weird, the “fish” resembles him. The man, who is not (yet) dead, reveals his secret to the peaceful angler: he is in fact a mobster who has cheated his associates out of their diamonds. What does not help Gerald at all is that the other hoods are persuaded HE is the double-crosser they are supposed to have done away with. Will he get himself out of such a tight situation? He will of course, but not without a little help from Suzie, the girl he only has eyes for!
Category: Comedy
In a film based on Neil Simon’s hit play, Walter Matthau portrays three unconnected roles. Sam Nash reluctantly joins his wife, Karen, in the suite where they spent their honeymoon, hoping to revive their flagging marriage. Then Jesse Kiplinger, an aging movie producer, is determined to seduce his old flame, Muriel. Finally, Matthau is beleaguered father Roy Hubley who, with his wife, Norma, struggles to get their daughter to her own wedding.
In this comedy of mistaken identity, a bookish literary reviewer bows to the desires of his lover and shaves off his whiskers. Suddenly he finds himself in trouble, for without the mustache, he is the spitting image of a gangster who has just been released from prison. When the mobster’s gang sees the reviewer, they immediately assume he is the boss and they take him away. Soon he finds himself in deep trouble.
——UPGRADED——
David Kolowitz, a nice young man living with his parents in New York City in 1938, works at a machine repair shop. His parents want David to study to become a pharmacist. But what he really wants is to be an actor like his idol, Ronald Colman. One day, at his friend Marvin’s suggestion, David tries out for a part in a play, and gets it, despite his obvious lack of acting experience (not to mention ability). To play his part, David must come up with his own costume – a tuxedo – and pay the house five dollars a week, ostensibly for tuition. But it is David’s first acting job, one which calls for him to “enter laughing.” And if it doesn’t work out – well, there’s always pharmacy school.
Stella is an out-of-left-field black comedy in which star Anne Sheridan is upstaged by an uproarious supporting cast. At a family picnic, a none too likeable uncle dies from accidentally eating poisoned mushrooms. The other family members don’t want to be accused of murder, so they leave it to the stupidest branch of the clan, personified by David Wayne and Frank Fontaine, to dispose of the body. When it is learned that Uncle had a hefty insurance policy, the family tries to palm off various corpses as the genuine article.
Widowed mother Charlotte Lord would like to marry wealthy Guy Barton, but Bartons’ avaricious ex-wife Sybil insists upon contesting their recent Mexican divorce. Charlotte’s daughters Jane, Leni and Marilyn conspire to put Sybil out of the way by pairing her off with Steve Nelson, gilding the lily by convincing Nelson to pose as Argentine cattle baron Don Pablo Viscente. The ruse almost works, but then the real Don Pablo shows up. Undaunted, the Lord girls concoct a variety of additional schemes to smooth the path of romance for their mother and the eligible Mr. Barton.
A family trip which transforms into a tragicomic psychological drama. Claiming that it was her son’s wish, Grandma Valerie is determined to transfer his urned remains from the small Czech town to their native Slovakia. Her daughter-in-law accompanies her, as do her two adult granddaughters, one nearing the end of her pregnancy with a five-year-old in tow, the other with her husband. Tense relations and conflict come to a head along the way, and the truth erupts from under layers of pretence and deferential consideration. The truths revealed are at times surprising, at others bitter or even comic, but always cleansing.