House Calls (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Howard ZieffRelease Date(s)
1978 (April 21, 2026)Studio(s)
Universal Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
For this reviewer, the romantic comedy House Calls (1978), starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, was quite the time-trip. I hadn’t seen it since the early days of cable TV, probably 1982 or so, and found it both delightful and a fascinating relic of its era.
Let’s get something out of the way first: previous home video versions of the film replaced the Beatles/George Harrison’s song Something with library music for years as producer Universal hadn’t acquired home video rights to the song. The poor replacement reportedly ruined the scene involved but, happily, this has been restored to the Blu-ray version.
Charley Nichols (Matthau) is a wealthy, recently widowed doctor at a downtrodden L.A. hospital, returning from a Hawaiian vacation. Partly because he is a wealthy physician, partly because Charley is genuinely charming, women working at the hospital find him irresistibly attractive, they vying to become the next Mrs. Nichols. Upon his return, Charley stumbles upon a patient, Ann Atkinson (Jackson), ineptly treated for a broken jaw by the hospital’s senile chief of staff, Dr. Amos Willoughby (Art Carney). Risking his own career, Charley performs a simple surgical procedure providing her much-needed relief, but angering Willoughby in the process, forcing Charley to agree to nominate the dangerously addled “old fart” for another five-year term.
Though Charley, who married his first wife as a virgin, is determined to sow a few wild oats with the young women virtually throwing themselves at him, he’s drawn to the older, opinionated, but intellectually compatible Ann. She, however, insists upon a committed, monogamous relationship, which he is reluctant to agree to.
At the same time, the hospital is threatened when one of its wealthiest donors, baseball team owner Grady, dies there due to negligence. His much younger widow, Ellen (Candice Azzara), attracted to Charley, threatens a lawsuit, and Willoughby pressures Charley to sleep with her.
Original writers Julius Epstein (Casablanca) and Max Shulman (of Dobie Gillis fame) clearly intended House Calls to be a modern take on the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedies of yore, with a dash of Judy Holliday (who co-starred in the Hepburn-Tracy vehicle Adam’s Rib), with Candice Azzara assuming that role. Epstein and Shulman weren’t happy when younger writers Alan Mandel and Charles Shyer were brought in to “punch up” their script, but little obvious damage was done. The film is of a type rarely made anymore, especially by a Hollywood studio: it’s a comedy rooted in wit, rather than slapstick, crudity, or one-liners. In their last years, Matthau along with Jack Lemmon revitalized their careers with Grumpy Old Men and its follow-ups. While these late-career comedies are quite enjoyable on their own terms, it was also a little sad that these veterans of Billy Wilder, Neil Simon, etc. had to resort to, at times, cartoony slapstick.
By contrast, the dialogue in House Calls is exactly the kind of thing found in the Hepburn-Tracy comedies, brought up to date without losing any of its sharpness in the process. It’s the kind of humor that requires the movie audience to pay attention and listen carefully to what Charley and Ann are saying to one another; if you’re scrolling on your cellphone you’re going to miss out, but if one pays attention there are little nuggets of comedy gold throughout. It even reflects back on these older romantic comedies—one funny scene has Charley and Ann trying to make love in bed with one foot on the floor, a reference to the old Hollywood Production Code.
With nearly 50 years of hindsight since, the picture has peculiar qualities. One senses the part of Charley, whom women find irresistible, probably wasn’t written with Matthau in mind, but throughout the 1970s he was the go-to actor for such films, a supremely talented but improbable movie star commanding a million dollars a movie. Nevertheless, the script makes him so sweetly charming that, oddly enough, it’s not difficult to accept that women find him so attractive.
Given Willoughby’s hopeless senility and multitude of health issues, one expects a character at least 90 years old, but in fact Art Carney was all of 59, less than two years older than Matthau, when the picture was made. Admittedly, after Harry and Tonto, Carney tended to play characters older than he actually was (e.g., the following year’s Going in Style) but, nevertheless, it exemplifies how perceptions of old age and aging have changed in the last half-century. The picture reunited Matthau and Carney, the often-forgotten original Odd Couple before the movie with Jack Lemmon and later TV series came along. For Matthau the project must have been a pleasurable experience, playing a character that’s both a sports fan and opera lover, two real-life passions, and which not only reunited him with Carney, Richard Benjamin (The Sunshine Boys) and Dick O’Neill (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three), both playing fellow doctors, but which also cast Matthau’s beloved son Charlie as Ann’s teenaged boy.
Matthau and Jackson are outstanding, as is Candice Azzara expertly playing a Judy Holliday type. Talent-wise, she’s in the same league as contemporary Madeline Kahn; why her career didn’t take off more than it did is a mystery. The film, however, was a big enough hit to prompt an okay 1979-82 TV show of the same name, more controversial for its behind-the-scenes troubles than funny, though it wasn’t bad.
Kino’s Blu-ray of House Calls, licensed from Universal, looks great, a pleasing balance of film grain, good color and contrast, presented in its original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also good, supported by optional subtitles, and kudos to Universal for ponying up whatever money was required to restore George Harrison’s song for a montage that would have been seriously damaged without it. The disc itself is Region “A” encoded.
Extras are limited to a mediocre-looking 4:3 trailer and an okay audio commentary track by Bryan Reesman and Mark Evry.
Watching House Calls again after so many decades left me a little wistful that this type of picture has pretty much vanished from the Hollywood landscape. It’s a modest production that didn’t cost much ($6.5 million) and made a healthy profit ($29 million in rentals), figures blockbuster-driven Hollywood is averse to now. And I kept marveling at the humor, funny dialogue driven by that lost art of wit. Highly Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV