← Back to Reviews
in
Harry and Tonto
Art Carney's Oscar-winning performance is the centerpiece of 1974's Harry and Tonto, a slightly pretentious and lumbering character study that hasn't aged well and seemed like it would never end.
After spending almost 30 years toiling in television and becoming an official TV star playing Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, Art Carney got his first significant film role playing Harry Combs, an intelligent and well-read senior citizen who loves to sing, though he really doesn't know the words to any of the songs he loves to sing. Harry's best friend is an aging cat named Tonto and their lives are forever altered when Harry is forced out of his apartment, which springboards a cross country adventure for an old man and his cat unlike anything you've ever seen.
Director and co-screenwriter Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) has crafted a somewhat interesting if long-winded look at a character who is mildly amusing but just didn't remain compelling enough to keep this reviewer invested for almost two hours. It became tiresome pretty quickly how Harry allowed this cat to complicate his life so much. I don't have anything against cats, but if I had nowhere to go, had a bus ticket to my daughter's house and my cat had to pee, I would not demand that the bus driver stop the bus and when the bus driver says it's time to go, I would have gotten back on that bus and when I get to my daughter's house, buy another cat.
Some of these scenes from the life of Harry and Tonto were most interesting than others. I did enjoy when a 16 year old hitchhiker (Melanie Mayron) talked Harry into reuniting with a childhood sweetheart (Geraldine Fitzgerald) who really didn't remember Harry. This was a lovely scene and I wish the rest of the film had been on the level with this scene.
Mazursky's direction is overly-detailed and Art Carney does turn in a wonderful performance as Harry, but was he really better than Pacino in Godfather II, Hoffman in Lenny, Nicholson in Chinatown, and Finney in Murder on the Orient Express? Absolutely not...this was definitely one of those "Lifetime Achievement/Body of Work" Oscars meant to recognize a career and not necessarily that performance. I think the Academy wanted to honor Carney because they didn't know how much longer Carney would be around and wanted to honor him. There are a pair of effective supporting turns by Larry Hagman and Ellen Burstyn as Carney's children (Burstyn won the Best Actress Oscar that year for another film), but this is Carney's film and as a matter of film history, it's worth a look, but it's really nothing special and I definitely kept checking my watch.
Art Carney's Oscar-winning performance is the centerpiece of 1974's Harry and Tonto, a slightly pretentious and lumbering character study that hasn't aged well and seemed like it would never end.
After spending almost 30 years toiling in television and becoming an official TV star playing Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, Art Carney got his first significant film role playing Harry Combs, an intelligent and well-read senior citizen who loves to sing, though he really doesn't know the words to any of the songs he loves to sing. Harry's best friend is an aging cat named Tonto and their lives are forever altered when Harry is forced out of his apartment, which springboards a cross country adventure for an old man and his cat unlike anything you've ever seen.
Director and co-screenwriter Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) has crafted a somewhat interesting if long-winded look at a character who is mildly amusing but just didn't remain compelling enough to keep this reviewer invested for almost two hours. It became tiresome pretty quickly how Harry allowed this cat to complicate his life so much. I don't have anything against cats, but if I had nowhere to go, had a bus ticket to my daughter's house and my cat had to pee, I would not demand that the bus driver stop the bus and when the bus driver says it's time to go, I would have gotten back on that bus and when I get to my daughter's house, buy another cat.
Some of these scenes from the life of Harry and Tonto were most interesting than others. I did enjoy when a 16 year old hitchhiker (Melanie Mayron) talked Harry into reuniting with a childhood sweetheart (Geraldine Fitzgerald) who really didn't remember Harry. This was a lovely scene and I wish the rest of the film had been on the level with this scene.
Mazursky's direction is overly-detailed and Art Carney does turn in a wonderful performance as Harry, but was he really better than Pacino in Godfather II, Hoffman in Lenny, Nicholson in Chinatown, and Finney in Murder on the Orient Express? Absolutely not...this was definitely one of those "Lifetime Achievement/Body of Work" Oscars meant to recognize a career and not necessarily that performance. I think the Academy wanted to honor Carney because they didn't know how much longer Carney would be around and wanted to honor him. There are a pair of effective supporting turns by Larry Hagman and Ellen Burstyn as Carney's children (Burstyn won the Best Actress Oscar that year for another film), but this is Carney's film and as a matter of film history, it's worth a look, but it's really nothing special and I definitely kept checking my watch.