The Out of Towners

The Out of Towners is a 1970 American comedy directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Neil Simon, starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as George and Gwen Kellerman, an Ohio couple whose overnight trip to New York City for a job interview collapses into a chain of mishaps. It was produced by Paramount Pictures and Jack Lemmon's Jalem Productions, Inc., with Paul Nathan as producer, Quincy Jones scoring the music, and Andrew Laszlo as cinematographer.¹

Origin and writing

Simon conceived the story as a one-act play intended as the fourth segment of his anthology play Plaza Suite, but he set it aside as better suited to the screen, and Plaza Suite reached the stage on 14 February 1968 at New York's Plymouth Theatre with three segments rather than four. In adapting it, Simon changed the hotel from the Plaza to the Waldorf Astoria.^{1 • 5}

The inspiration came from an incident around 1967, when Simon flew to Boston to work on David Merrick's musical How Now, Dow Jones: "Flying up there, I was caught in a major snowstorm, lost my luggage, spent three hours getting to the hotel on icy streets, a trip which normally was a ten-minute ride." He returned to the idea after completing his 1970 play The Gingerbread Lady, and shared the draft with Lemmon over lunch at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.⁵

A trade announcement in October 1968 identified it as Simon's second original screenplay, following After the Fox (1966). Lemmon was attached to star and hoped to cast Joanne Woodward opposite him, but by late December 1968 Sandy Dennis had been set for the female lead.¹

Production

Principal photography began on 18 March 1969 in Boston, where Logan International Airport stood in for itself, and continued in New York City at Grand Central Station, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and a Manhattan police station. An estimated ninety percent of the picture was to be filmed at night, largely because the Waldorf Astoria allowed the crew on the premises only between midnight and 6:00 a.m. A commuter train sequence was shot over one week on a train running between Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California. Filming ended in early June 1969. Director Arthur Hiller credited the production's smoothness to Mayor John Lindsay's efforts to lower union rates and ease filming restraints in New York.¹

The film is a record of its locations: Central Park, the Waldorf-Astoria, Manhattan street corners, Boston's Logan Airport and South Station, and, as the Twin Oaks airport, MacArthur Airport in Islip, Long Island.⁵

Cast

Beyond Lemmon and Dennis, the film features a roster of character actors in bit parts, including Sandy Baron as Lenny Moyers, Anne Meara as a robbery victim, Graham Jarvis as Murray the mugger, Ann Prentiss as an airline stewardess, Ron Carey as a cab driver, Philip Bruns as Officer Meyers, Billy Dee Williams as an airline employee, and, in smaller roles, Paul Dooley, Dolph Sweet, Richard Libertini, and Robert Nichols.^{2 • 5 • 6}

Reception

Seventeen preview screenings were held on 10 March 1970 in cities across the United States. Critical reception was mixed. Daily Variety called the film "a total delight," and Time magazine praised Simon as "a careful comic craftsman" drawing belly laughs from realistic situations. Roger Greenspun's New York Times review deemed it "a conscious exercise in dulled insights and missed opportunities," and complained that a boom microphone became visible about two-thirds of the way through the picture and stayed there; the TCM account notes the visible boom was probably due to a print projected at the wrong aspect ratio. The Hollywood Reporter's John Mahoney later called it "the closest the sound film has come to recapturing the genius of the silent movie chase comedy."^{1 • 5 • 3}

The film's anti-urbanism has been read in context: it appeared at a moment when municipal strikes frequently crippled New York City, and scholars of 1970s cinema have placed it among films that figure the city as a hostile place, its "amiable anti-urbanism" concluding that the good life was to be found back in Twin Oaks after all.^{5 • 8}

Legacy and remake

The year after release, Simon and Hiller collaborated on the screen version of Plaza Suite (1971), the play for which the story had originally been conceived, and re-teamed in 1984 on The Lonely Guy. Paramount released a remake in 1999 starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, produced without Simon's or Hiller's involvement and directed by Sam Weisman; the TCM account records it as generally judged inferior to the 1970 original. When the original was first shown on network television, it was shorn of its closing punchline because of a censorship rule.^{5 • 1 • 6}

References

1. The Out-of-Towners (1970), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. The Out of Towners (1970), Paramount Pictures
3. The Out-of-Towners, Rotten Tomatoes
4. The Out of Towners (1970) critic reviews, Metacritic
5. Bret Wood, The Out-of-Towners (1970), Turner Classic Movies
6. The Out-of-Towners (1970), Tribute Movies
7. The Out-of-Towners (1970), NetflixMovies.com
8. The Cinema of Urban Crisis

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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