Harry Coombes is an elderly widower and retired teacher who is evicted from his Upper West Side apartment in New York City because his building will be razed to build a parking lot. He initially stays with his eldest son Burt's family in the suburbs, but chooses to travel cross-country with his pet cat Tonto.
Initially planning to fly to Chicago, Harry has a problem with airport security checking his cat carrier. He instead boards a long-distance bus. He disembarks in the countryside so that Tonto can urinate, and the angry bus driver leaves him there. Harry buys a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air[2] from, although his driver's license has expired. During his episodic journey, he befriends a Bible-quoting hitchhiker and an underage runaway named Ginger, with whom he visits an old sweetheart in a retirement home who barely remembers him. He visits his daughter, a bookstore owner in Chicago, with whom he shares a prickly but mutually admiring relationship. Harry's shy grandson and Ginger depart for a commune in Colorado in Harry's car, with his blessing, so he and Tonto are on their own again.
Continuing west, Harry accepts a ride with a health-food salesman, meets an attractive hooker on his way to Las Vegas and spends a night in jail with a friendly Indian. He eventually arrives in Los Angeles, where he stays with his youngest son Eddie, a financially strapped real-estate salesman, before finding a place of his own with Tonto.
After Tonto dies, Harry is living alone, making new friends and enjoying the climate. He sees a young cat who looks exactly like Tonto and follows it to the beach, where a child is building a sand castle.
Mazursky wanted James Cagney for the role of Harry, but Cagney declined the offer, as did Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant. Mazursky then saw Art Carney in a play and approached him. Carney initially declined as well, in part because he was about 15 years younger than Harry, but he eventually agreed.[3] Cast as an elderly man, Carney, who was born in 1918, was actually only 13 years older than the actors who played his sons, Larry Hagman and Phil Bruns, and 14 years older than Ellen Burstyn, who played his daughter. Thanks to the makeup of Emmy-winning artist Bob O'Bradovich, Carney was transformed into the elderly Harry.
Carney did not like cats prior to his work in Harry and Tonto, but he established a good relationship with the cats in the film.[4] After filming, the animal wrangler offered Mazursky one of the two cats who played Tonto, but Mazursky declined because his wife had become allergic to them.
Muriel Beerman, who plays the cab driver, was a talkative part-time taxi driver who had driven Mazursky to the casting office one day.
Reception
Nora Sayre of The New York Times wrote that Harry and Tonto had been "directed at far too slow a pace, which means that the comic possibilities and the social comment have been diminished. The muted style robs the picture of the point it's meant to make: that imaginative energy transcends the generations."[5]
Variety called the film "pleasant, if commercially unexciting," with an "excellent" performance by Carney.[6]
Roger Ebert awarded the film 4 stars out of 4, praising Carney for a performance that was "totally original, all his own, and worthy of the Academy Award it received."[7]
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded 3.5 out of 4 stars, calling it "an extremely funny movie without a single gag or a Bob Hope punch line. Rather, it's crammed full of believable people who say the kind of screwball things that make your head spin and smile."[8]
In The Monthly Film Bulletin, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that the film "presumes to say something smart and 'sophisticated' about everything from urban renewal to Carlos Castaneda's medicinal lore, along with a continuous lesson about growing old gracefully that is dished out at every opportunity; yet it winds up telling us virtually nothing at all."[9]
The film holds a score of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 32 reviews, with an average grade of 7.3 of 10. The critics' consensus states: "Making his sorely belated debut in a big-screen leading role, Art Carney brings Harry and Tonto brilliantly to life."[10]
↑ Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN978-0-8108-4244-1. p174.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
