This movie has many laughs. The dialog is funny in places, but the pratfalls and physical miscues that happen to Chevy Chase's character are the source of most of the laughter. His routines and mishaps resemble something out of the Three Stooges. "Seems Like Old Times," is an entertaining comedy with Chevy Chase as Nicholas Gardenia. He is a writer who is divorced from Goldie Hahn's Glenda Parks. She is now married to Ira Parks, played by Charles Grodin. Glenda and Ira are both attorneys. He is a DA whom the governor of California plans to pick for state attorney general. She takes mostly pro bono work, defending the poor but guilty. She is a one-person rehabilitation center because she employs many of the bad apples she gets off the hook. Of course, they don't change. The hilarity of this movie reaches its zenith when a couple of ex- cons kidnap Nick and force him at gunpoint to be the front man for the hold-up of a Carmel bank. Nick comes back to Glenda as his only source of help. He hides in their garage. The cops are looking for him. Ira wants to put him in prison for good. Glenda tries to send him away. He comes back. She hides him. This goes on throughout the film Chase does what he does best – the sort of deadpan mannerism with delivery of funny lines as asides. This may be Hahn's best comedy. She doesn't force herself in this one – it seems to come naturally, and she isn't otherwise a bumbling goofus. It's a light comedy with plenty of laughs that most viewers should enjoy.

Take one clever plot and divvy it up between two great American writers of the 20th century, get them to write screenplays some thirty years apart with the first emphasising the moral aspect and the second hitting the zingers and you wind up with two movies that can both sustain repeated viewings. Arguably the first movie, The Talk Of The Town, had the better actors - Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Coleman, plus the writer with the broadest range - short stories, novels, plays - in Irwin Shaw but neither Neil Simon nor thesps Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase are chopped liver so what we have here is a fine movie in which the moral aspects are played down at the expense of the one-liners. Personally I wouldn't like to choose but if I were tied down and a blowtorch applied to my sensitive areas I'd probably opt for The Talk Of The Town but that's not to say I wouldn't buy both on DVD.

Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase reunite for "Seems Like Old Times," a 1980 Neil Simon comedy that borrows heavily from the Cary Grant-Jean Arthur "Talk of the Town." Hawn is an attorney and ex-wife of Chase, and she's now married to DA Charles Grodin, who's about to be made Attorney General of the state. Chase is forced to take part in a robbery and is on the lam and shows up at her house and several inopportune moments - like when she's entertaining the governor. She feels compelled to help him, but there's nothing unusual there - she has stray dogs, cats, and paroled defendants overrunning her house.The actors are excellent, as is the funny supporting cast, and there are some hilarious scenes as Chase hides out in a room above the garage and, while under the bed, his hand extending a little, Grodin stands on his finger as he argues with Hawn.What bothers me about this comedy is that there aren't any around like this anymore. The "comedy" today aims at the lowest common denominator - Woody Allen uses the term "crass" to describe them - and for someone of my generation, what passes as comedy today just isn't funny. Today these situational comedies are written off for some reason in favor of stupidity. I don't get it. I lament the days of "Arthur," where you missed some of the jokes in the theater because the audience was laughing so hard, "Night Shift," and "Seems Like Old Times."

This film was a sequel film to a better comedy: FOUL PLAY which was made in 1976 and co-starred Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn. In that one the former was a police officer who is trying to protect the Pope on a visit to San Francisco, and the latter is an innocent by-stander who stumbles into the details of an assassination plot. The story worked with the assistance of Dudley Moore as a befuddled not-so-innocent third party who gets dragged into the proceedings by Hawn, Eugene Roche as a conspirator, Billy Barty as an accidental victim of Hawn's fears and hysteria, and Burgess Meredith and Rachel Roberts having an unexpected classic judo face off. Oh, all to the concluding music from Act I of Gilbert and Sullivan's THE MIKADO.SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES is a remake of sorts of the 1942 film THE TALK OF THE TOWN. That film dealt with Cary Grant as a fugitive being hidden in a house by Jean Arthur, while jurist Ronald Colman (just nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court) is renting the same house from Arthur. Here Chase is the fugitive, hiding in the garage of his first wife Hawn, unbeknown-st to her second husband Charles Grodin (who is being considered for the post of Attorney General of California. The screenplay is by Neil Simon this time, and there is good supporting roles by Robert Guillaume, George Grizzard, and Harold Gould (as an increasingly annoyed local judge). However, TALK OF THE TOWN was dealing with a man accused of an arson murder due to his labor union activities. Grant was an activist in that film. Chase comes across as something of a schmuck here - he is forced at gunpoint to assist two men in a bank robbery, is set up to deliver the note to the teller, gets his face photographed too well by the bank's camera, and is then tossed out of the speeding car on a hillside by the two felons. The audience knows Chase is innocent, and gradually Hawn and Grondin and Guillaume realize it too. But it seems that Chase had a similar bad experience in Mexico regarding being framed for a drug deal - and had spent some time in prison as a result there. He seems to be an unlucky sort.The weaknesses of Chase's character aside, SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES is funny, and understandably so - it has a Neil Simon script. In fact, aside from the one-liners that pepper it, there are moments in it that reminded me of other films and plays Simon has written. In some late moments of intimacy between Hawn and Chase I felt that some of Chase's descriptions of Hawn's little idiosyncrasies actually could have been dialog left over from BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, from scenes between Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. And the unwelcome intrusion of Chase into an organized household resembles the situations in THE ODD COUPLE and THE SUNSHINE BOY, where Oscar has to make room for Felix, and Willie Clark has to reunite with Al Lewis.There are plenty of amusing sections: Chase fighting back fear and hysteria when he is with the kidnapping bank robbers (when he compliments the wording of the bank robbing note, the robber who wrote it thanks him); Hawn's fighting for the underdog legal practice, which results in her having a growing number of clients she is helping to get honest employment for - even in her own household; Gould's judge trying to get to the point of the ridiculous arguments and fact patterns that first Hawn and later Grodin put into his court; Grizzard's governor looking forward to dinner with his future attorney general, and his favorite dish, only to find the state's number one criminal is serving it to him. All in all it is an entertaining film. But it is not as concentrated and unified a script as FOUL PLAY was. You will enjoy the film, but FOUL PLAY is somewhat more memorable.