“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”
— T.K. Whipple (As quoted in the beginning of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.)
Billy Crystal’s character is thirty-nine, an age which seemed ancient when I first saw City Slickers at the drive-in theater twenty-five years ago. Like Logan’s Run, it’s a movie I can better appreciate now that I’ve gained perspective on this funny thing called age. I’m going through a phase in which I’m drawn to reading and watching westerns almost exclusively. Taking a couple of weeks off to drive cattle actually sounds more attractive than a trip to Disney World (though to be perfectly honest, this city slicker would prefer to do neither).
It’s suggested that every year, Crystal’s less neurotic friends (Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby) concoct semi-idiotic vacations and drag him along. Their latest scheme indulges a western fantasy, in which well-to-do city folk can pay for the opportunity to become temporary cowpunchers. Crystal is reluctant to go until his patient wife points out that he’s forgotten how to smile. She thinks this goofy adventure might be good for him.
City Slickers isn’t terribly successful at being a comedy, but it’s a surprisingly deep character story. The three friends are much more than their archetypes would suggest. Stern, for instance, pretends he’s fallen asleep so he doesn’t have to speak to his overbearing wife; he possesses more wants and fears than the two-dimensional characters in most comedies. Kirby, who’s an even better actor than Crystal, proves to be more interesting than the playboy owner of a sporting goods shop we’re initially introduced to—particularly when he reveals why he’s so weird about women. A lot of comedies would have mined his strange job for cheap laughs. This one doesn’t.
Then you have Curly, who’s played by Jack Palance. Palance is one of my all-time favorite actors due to his uncanny ability to chew scenery in a believable way (I still think he would have made a better Joker than Jack Nicholson). In lesser comedies, he would have parodied his former screen persona for a cheap laugh. Thankfully, City Slickers isn’t content with being “just a comedy” because he warms up to these guys about halfway through. It’s refreshing what the filmmakers do with Palance, despite the fact they completely undo all that hard work in the inferior sequel.
So yeah, as a comedy it’s kind of slow—the goofy music can be as insistent as a bad laugh-track while a lot of the minor characters are unbelievably over-the-top, particularly Stern’s wife, whose face is often filmed with a bit of a fishbowl lens, which is a comedy technique that’s never been funny. Although I’ve seen much funnier comedies than City Slickers, few of them were as good. I feel prepared for thirty-nine.
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