Every once in a while, you watch a random film, and hours, days, weeks, a lifetime later, it's one you find you just never forget.This, for me, is one of those films.Flying under the radar, and IMMENSELY underrated, this one quietly showed up in 1982, and then seemed to be gone and forgotten about, by nearly everyone.Though it did have a video (vhs) release, criminally, it was never released on DVD.But now, the little film that could, is FINALLY available on DVD, as part of 20th Century Fox's Cinema Archives series.Maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world will now slowly catch on to this sneaky little gem of a movie, and find themselves remembering it hours, days, weeks.......or even a lifetime later.

Wonderful film with Neil Simon again showing that he is the master of writing.Dinah Manoff is just marvelous as the precocious 19 year old who goes to California to see the dad she hasn't seen in 16 years.The film is touching as it first shows that Matthau knows so little about his daughter (and son) but then as the film goes on, he shows all the attributes that a father shows.As Matthau's girlfriend, Ann-Margret is very good. The picture itself provides no screaming of usual Matthau antics. He is genuine here in every sense of the word.The film shows the strong bond that is formed and we're sorry when Libby takes the bus back to N.Y. At least, there is a commitment by the father to keep in touch. We also have to wonder what kind of woman he was married to that drove him away years before.

which had been performed on Broadway in the mid-late 70's. It was an interesting and light generational & family piece which centers around a teenager girl arriving at the home of her long-absconded father. Dad turns out to be the opposite of everything a girl could have hoped for, a slovenly failure living in a run-down home in L.A. Dinah Manhoff (the daughter of Lee Grant) and Walter Matthau do fine job of father and daughter battling guilt, anger, expectations, hopes and dreams. A line I remember well comes when Ms. Manhoff is berating Mr. Matthau for his failures as a father by comparing him to the steadfast grandmother who raised her and her brother "My grandmother was my father." Catch this little seen film if you can.

It must have been a casting no-brainer to put Dinah Manoff in the film-adaptation of Neil Simon's Broadway hit "I Ought To Be In Pictures" since she played the part of headstrong Libby on the stage. Unfortunately, a bombastic concoction such as Libby cannot be easily transferred to the more intimate medium of film, and the writing leaves both Manoff and the viewer at a complete loss. Neil Simon writes gag-dialogue, gag-characters, gag-situations, so when he tries to get serious--the audience doesn't know how to respond. Is this guy kidding again? Libby moves from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to reconnect with her estranged screenwriter father, ostensibly to break into movies but mostly because she needs a loving dad to hold her. These later scenes are so uncomfortable, so static, that poor Walter Matthau can only sit on the end of the bed and gape (I've never seen him at such a loss). Ann-Margret has a warm, grounded presence as Matthau's girlfriend (it's not much of a role, and the dialogue is still in Simon's one-note, but A-M manages to give this woman some soul). Manoff, looking and acting like a cross between Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol, projects to the rafters, as if she were still on Broadway. She's Gussy Gumshun; and when the barriers come down and she's vulnerable, we would like to give her our sympathies, but Simon won't let us. He has already moved on, to the next limp gag. ** from ****