Few other comedic filmmakers understand the west on a comedic, farcical level than Ron Underwood. Just a year before directing City Slickers, Underwood directed one of my favorite contemporary comedy/horror films, Tremors, about a small, rather unpopulated town in Nevada being literally swallowed by mutant, underground worms. The film was not just fun to watch, but fun to imagine that deep underground there are large, unearthly worms that have remained undetected by elaborate seismographs and are now resurfacing to swallow anything that could cause a detectable vibration underground. Needless to say, after watching it when I was eight, I took extra-quiet steps.
And here's City Slickers, a comedy that uses the wild west as a background for numerous visual gags, snappy wordplay, and a trio of great performances. The three guys are Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), a radio advertiser who is experiencing his midlife crisis after turning thirty-nine, Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern), who is stuck in a sexless marriage in the midst of managing a grocery store, and Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby), a womanizer uncomfortable with the notion that there is a time to "settle down." On his birthday, Mitch is given a present from his two buds which is a vacation down on a southern cattle drive. Reluctantly, he accepts, and before they know it, they are defending the cattle drive in true western fashion.
Billy Crystal is an ideal character for Mitch. He has the right balance of comedic wit and dramatic potency to make a character like this work well on the basis of being a sadsack but also a compelling lead. Stern and Kirby work well in the supporting characters, mainly because they themselves have good comedic timing and work well off of Crystal's lead.
City Slickers works better than another western farce by the name of Three Amigos, which was stunningly mediocre in its inclusion of three hilarious comedians - Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short - and successfully finding nothing interesting to do with them. The film drifted from one stale setup to another, falling flat on its face, before stumbling over to the next contrived setup and doing the same. Too many instances in the film were dry and the laugh to actor ration was surprisingly very low.
City Slickers works because writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel know how to effectively utilize their talent and give each character sustainable depth and energy to run for the near-two hour runtime the film holds. In that time, the film is often funny, kind of poignant, a little overlong, but heartfelt all the more. It's some kind of minor miracle this was well-received by a general public.
Starring: Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby. Directed by: Ron Underwood.
