City Slickers (1991)

City Slickers is a good movie with a well written storyline and an impressive comedic cast. It has many very funny parts and it is also quite sweet as we follow the friendship of these three men, their is great chemistry between all three and you could tell they were real life friends. It easily could have been an outstanding, unforgettable comedy, which many people think it is, and though I did laugh a lot, I find it pretty forgettable and none of the quotes will stick with me. I definitely don't think Jack Palance deserved the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, he did a great job and Curly is a very likable character, but it simply isn't a performance, nor is it a movie, strong enough for an award of this prestige. It's certainly not outstanding or unforgettable, but City Slickers is fun while it lasts and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a comedy to kill some time. A man unhappy with his life is talked in to going on a cattle drive with his two closest friends. Best Performance: Billy Crystal Worst Performance: Patricia Wettig

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.

As a guy who just turned 30, got himself married and gave up many crazy projects in order to convince the woman of his life that he's ready to raise a family, I'm probably sure I would end up like Mitch Robbins when I'll turn 39, or like his best friend Phil, or who knows, maybe like Ed. Yes sir, maturity, responsibility, practicality turned "City Slickers", a film I laughed at a lot when I was a kid, into a real eye-opening experience, the laughs are still intact, but the whole existential thing cut to my heart, as it never did, making some parts depressingly predictive. This is to the credit of "City Slickers", a great comedy with an original premise; three white- collar New Yorkers decide to spend a two-week vacation, herding cattle from New Mexico to Colorado, like real cowboys. Billy Crystal is Mitch, Daniel Stern is Phil and the late Bruno Kirby is Ed, the film screams '90's comedy' through these three faces, but their friendship is not just believable, I wouldn't believe it if these guys were not friends in real life. They share their childhood, baseball and fathers' memories (sometimes, the three at once) with the kind of passion that can only be expressed between pals. "City Slickers" features real characters, with real problems, real dilemma, and real fears, in a sort of psychological build-up that makes the whole experience even more insightful.Naturally, the film offers the obligatory gallery of supporting characters with their share of goofiness and sympathy, there is a father and his son, both "black and dentist" as states the son, making an issue of it before anyone would do. There are David Paymer and Josh Mostel as Ira and Barry Shalowitz, owners of one of the biggest national ice companies, a la Ben & Jerry's, and a pretext to a hilarious line when they're asked why it's not their faces that are featured in the boxes "would you eat it if it was us?". There's naturally the pretty blonde who might mislead the first-time viewers, but wisely enough, the script avoids any attempt of a romance (the kind that undermined even such classics as "Red River", to which "City Slickers" is a clear homage). These guys have enough problems, Mitch is in a middle-age crisis, contemplating the emptiness of his life, Phil lost his job and wife, Ed lives with a 24-year old girl who wants a baby, whatever the solution is, it's not a woman… not yet anyway. "City Slickers" is a buddy movie and I guess that's what men would enjoy the most: watching guys they can all relate to, having a good time once in their lives, having a break. By taking them to a totally exotic setting, the film illustrates the miraculous effect communion with nature has on men. A poet said once, "it's only when you get at the top of a mountain that you start climbing", in "City Slickers", it's when they'll get at the end of the road that the road of their lives will start. This is what it's all about, a new start, with new decisions, new choices. Each one has to figure what the one thing he cares the most is and stick with it. Like the best comedies, "City Slickers" speaks a powerful and inspirational message about our capacity to change our lives without changing much, just the mindset. And one character embodies this spirit; it's Curly, the veteran cow boy, the toughest man Mitch ever saw. Curly is the character the movie needed the most. Without him, it would have been a bunch of city slickers playing cowboys, but Jack Palance, with his rock-graved face and inimitable grin, is the remaining link to this missed era. The film doesn't just feature a bunch of tender-feet herding a cattle, it's also the celebration of the cowboy spirit, the Old West as a part of history, of pop-culture and cinematic heritage. It's one thing to have the guys yelling "Yee- haaa" like in "Red River", or the trio humming the "Bonanza" theme. Jack Palance's face is the continuation of Hollywood's Golden Age. And when he said "we're a dying breed", I wondered if he was speaking only about cowboys or also about his generation of actors. Palance elevates the film beyond the simple comedy label, and that his brief performance earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor proves how unforgettable he was. That's what a supporting is about, helping the main character to change, to see life differently, without doing much.Directed by Ron Underwood, "City Slickers" belongs to the best breed of comedy. It is full of priceless exchanges, like a Leone-like duel about ice cream-flavor, or an unforgettable stamped caused by a coffee thermos, many tender subplots like the birth of a little calf that made me for one second considering turning into vegetarian, and the growing complicity between Curly and Mitch. It's funny and warm, and although it does sometimes overdo the male-bonding thing, it never gets over the top. I felt for Mitch when he was wondering what his job was about, for Phil when he finally vented his anger repressed for many years on the bullies, and Ed who seems to incarnate this guilty pleasure, we, committed men, fantasize on? And the icing on the cake is the 'Magnificent Seven'-like score of the film which never seems out-of-place."City Slickers" is one of these few comedies that make you both laugh and think like "Groundhog Day" or "Back to the Future", but it doesn't take a fantasy device for that, just an Old West trip. And it's an invitation for each of us to find out this 'one thing' that counts the most, and which 'cowboy trip' would help us to figure out.

Billy Crystal, Jack Palance, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby, Patricia Wettig and Noble Willingham star in this 1991 comedy. Mitch (Crystal) is a radio ad salesman who has just celebrated his birthday. He's very depressed and seems to be going through a mid-life crisis along with his pals, Phil (Stern) and Ed (Kirby). They decide to get away by taking a cattle drive that runs from New Mexico to Colorado where they meet tough cowboy, Curly (Palance) who scares Mitch at first, but they become friends. Soon after Curly passes, Mitch and his pals find themselves on a western adventure of bringing the herd across river to Colorado. Wettig plays Mitch's wife, Barbara and Willingham (The Last Boy Scout) plays Clay Stone, the man who runs the cattle drive. I've always liked this film and Billy & the cast are great. I recommend this good comedy.