Harry and Tonto
Directed by Paul Mazursky
Written by Paul Pazursky and Josh Greenfield
1974/US
IMDb page
First viewing/Netflix rental
Harry: You know, the strangest thing about being old is… all your friends are dead.
Shirley: Well, all your old friends, maybe. You could make new friends, you know?
There are coming of age movies and coming to terms with age movies. This is a good example of the latter.
Harry (Art Carney) is a seventy-something who has lived for some years in the same apartment building in New York City. He has long been a widower. His most faithful friend is his cat Tonto. The neighborhood is changing in ways Harry doesn’t like and now they are demolishing the building for a parking garage. Harry has to be removed by force.
Harry’s son Burt offers to take him in. Harry’s son is welcoming but it is clear his wife and two sons are not fans of the idea. Harry’s grandson Norman is on some kind of mystical hunger and silence strike. Harry tries to talk some sense into him. Harry eventually decides that living with Burt is not for him either and announces he is going on a road trip to visit his other children: Susan (Ellen Burstyn) in Chicago and Eddie (Larry Hagman) in Los Angeles.
The problem is Tonto. The airline will not take him without doing a security screen, which Harry refuses, and when Harry tries to sneak Tonto onto a bus, the cat is not a fan of its toilet facilities. Harry’s driver’s license expired in 1958. Finally Harry buys a used car and picks up a couple of hitchhikers. He asks one of them to drive.
The driver splits off early on and Harry carries on his journey with 15-year-old Ginger (Melanie Mayron) who is running away to join a commune in Boulder, Colorado. They get talking about Harry’s first love and Ginger insists on trying to find her. She has grown up to be Geraldine Fitzgerald and is now living in a memory-care facility. They finally make it to Chicago, where Harry has a rather tense reunion with Susan. Norman is sent by his parents to locate Harry and meets up with him in Arizona. He decides to try out the commune Ginger is headed for. Finally, Harry reaches Los Angeles where his playboy son Eddie is not living the life he has described. With Arthur Hunnicutt as a quack medicine salesman and Chief Dan George as a cellmate.
Here we have a movie where the main character has to trust in the kindness of strangers and appears to be in no danger at anytime. It really was a more innocent age. This could pull at the heart strings in all the wrong way if it were not for the grounded dignified performance of Art Carney, who won the Oscar for Best Actor. The supporting cast is also solid and the script does not go overboard.
Paul Mazursky told Carney he would win the Oscar and was proved right. Carney was good in an Oscar-bait performance. Or maybe it was the goodwill earned by the actor from years of performing the role of Ed Norton hilariously in the TV series “The Honeymooners”. But was he better than nominees Jack Nicholson (Chinatown); Al Pacino (The Godfather Part II); Albert Finney (Murder on the Orient Express) or Dustin Hoffman (Lenny)? If it were left up to me, Gene Hackman’s performance in The Conversation would have won out over all of them. The film was also nominated in the category of Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
