Consciously or unconsciously, Neil Simon seems to have looted the entire genre of screwball comedy for this farce: the plot outline (fugitive in the attic, district attorney in the kitchen, frazzled heroine stuck in the middle) comes from George Stevens’s Talk of the Town, but there are ghostly traces of dozens of other films. It didn’t really work for me—director Jay Sandrich is strictly from the sledgehammer school of comic timing, and Chevy Chase contributes an unforgivably supercilious performance—but I admire the attempt to revive meaningful character comedy. With Goldie Hawn, playing straight and looking squelched, and Charles Grodin, who brings some depth and sympathy to the thankless Ralph Bellamy role.
