Review of The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) by Paul Z — 05 Mar 2011

If Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue is less than an intense survey of a married couple impelled to nervous breakdown by the exasperations and disgrace of bourgeois living, it still achieves compelling thrust, both somber and hilarious, mostly the latter though. If Melvin Frank's direction is accomplished but not inventive, he's skillfully served by a cast largely populated by Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft, who launch vigorously sincere characterization as credible as the real Second Avenue and other New York locales captured by the Technicolor cameras.

Lemmon is aggravated and angst-peppered owing to the defective air-conditioning and thoughtless neighbors in his high-rise apartment house, among other things. And, his tattered nerves aren't greatly relieved when he is fired by his on-the-fence company. As an unemployed ad executive, he can't be liable for being impatient with the unemployment office. And he shouldn't be condemned for pounding on flimsy walls, cursing the neighbors, who drench him with water in reprisal, and developing neuroses swollen by imposed joblessness and appointments with an evasive shrink.

If Bancroft, as his genuinely devoted spouse who purposefully gets a job to sustain them, becomes overwrought and bemused to the point of paranoia, she, too, can't be blamed for her mounting worries when she ultimately must choose whether to receive financial help from her husband's apprehensive, if quizzical, siblings. Lemmon, no alien to Simon's work, and Bancroft are most believable and identifiable when unromanticized, and the strength of the piece is in their collaboration in roles as familiar in their comic reciprocating as many of New York's scuttling millions. And they get strong support from Odd Couple director Gene Saks, as Lemmon's prosperous, straightforward older brother and Elizabeth Wilson and Florence Stanley, as his suspicious sisters, not to mention a young Sylvester Stallone's hilarious scene, which could be the high point of the picture.

They aren't in the thick of Greek tragedy or in humdrum sitcom TV. Simon is sober about a premise that isn't momentous and he reasonably swathes its earnestness with real laughs that pop up, including radio news items such as the update that a Polish freighter has just collided with the Statue of Liberty. And, with a cast whose members recognize the value of what they're saying and doing, the trials and tribulations of Second Avenue become a diversion.