HOUSE CALLS

title: HOUSE CALLS

year: 1978

cast: Walter Matthau

rating: ***

The main character, a newly widowed doctor whom every woman in town, young and old alike, is crazy about, must have been originally written with someone else in mind. Burt Reynolds perhaps. Walter Matthau, who looks a cross between Richard Nixon and Fred Flintstone, is the gigalo doc who makes a lot of money (perhaps this is the reason he's a chick-magnet: doctors were like rock stars in the seventies) and after shagging a bevy of young hotties meets a cold old sickle of a gal, british Glenda Jackson, who, despite spells of forced-smiles makes Nurse Ratched seem like Lambchop - and they have a romance that works despite itself (Bill and Hillary, anyone?). That is, until Matthau comprises their trust and has to win her back at the end. This is a decent romantic comedy made during a time when looks didn't matter, only story-line: the basic plot centering on a grade-b hospital run by senile Art Carney, while Matthau and fellow doctor Richard Benjamin try their best to keep it going... with the love story providing the base. You'll be entertained once you get past the fact Matthau is impersonating Cary Grant from the forties, somehow. Love is blind; as were most romantic comedies from the seventies: era of the "sensitive guy meets the hardened feminist with the heart of gold."