by Katrina Bertz
The film After the Fox centers on recovering money from a heist through the use of impersonation. The film manages to laugh at the film industry by making fun of prominent directors, actors and even critics. The film was directed by Vittorio De Sica, but written by Neil Simon; a man whose prolific career spawned many satirical comedies. That is mostly what Simon is known for: plays and film adaptations that have serious subjects through a comical lens in order to soften the blow.
Neil Simon was born in the Bronx in New York City in 1927. Growing up was difficult, as his parents had a very bad and unrestrained marriage. He found himself going to the movie theatre frequently in order to escape his home life (Bio paragraph 2). This is something that would affect his playwriting years later. In the majority of his plays, his married characters, while flawed in life, are not in their marriages. They tend to always be happy. Divorce was never seen as a release or happiness, it was always a punishment. This could possibly be because of how he witnessed in his parent’s marriage, as well as his own. Simon would go on to have five marriages to four women, producing three children (Bio paragraph 6).
After working at Warner Brothers during the 1950s, he began writing for a television show called Your Show of Shows. He ended up working with other talents such as Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (Bio paragraph 3). Once there, he began writing plays for Broadway. His plays tended to be much like the films made by the comedians Simon grew up watching, such as Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy: humor blended with pathos.
Unfortunately, this also allowed the critics of the 1960s to disparage Simon’s works, believing them to be too sentimental and outdated (Bio paragraph 5). However, in 1965, Neil Simon won his first Tony Award for his play The Odd Couple. This Tony award would not be his last. He would go on to write screen plays, theatre plays and win awards well into the early 2000s, his last credit being to a film adaptation of The Goodbye Girl in 2004.
Misch claims that one principle of comedy is “that the sillier and more absurd the comedy, the more seriously you have to take it, (Misch p.111). This could be said of Simon’s plays as well. While his writing style isn’t necessarily silly, it certainly has silly moments which were warranted in order to achieve the overall message. For example, in The Out-of-Towners, the Kellermans face several muggings in New York City’s Central Park while trying to get to their destination. The muggings do not result in their harm, nor do they even resemble a real-life mugging situation. However, Simon was writing about the recent rise of crime that was occurring in his home town in the 1960s. He chose to make the situation silly and funny in order to get the message across.
And this is the legacy that Neil Simon leaves behind in cinema: displaying the state of the world in which we live through situational humor in order to make it more palatable. While some critics may have mixed views as to Simon’s sentimentality and traditional values, he still made many memorable, comedic plays and films; which still have an audience.
Selected Filmography:
Come Blow your Horn- 1963
After the Fox- 1966
Barefoot in the Park- 1967
The Odd Couple- 1968
The Out-of-Towners- 1970
The Heartbreak Kid- 1972
The Goodbye Girl- 1977
Works Cited:
Biography.com Ed. Neil Simon Biography. “The Biography.com Website.” Pub. A&E Television Networks. Access Date: 3/10/2016. Web. http://www.biography.com/people/neil-simon-9484352#synopsis
Misch, David. Funny, The Book: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Comedy. Applause theatre and Cinema Books. Milwaukee, WI. 2012. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment