Oldfellas

“What a drag it is getting old.”

-  The Rolling Stones lyric, written in 1966 by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 23

It’s a premise as tired and as forced as the weary, phony smiles on the faces of the stars of “Last Vegas” as they paraded past one photographer after another for magazine covers and press junkets, trying to pretend they’re really pals off-camera.

A handful of buddies experience rites of passage during a bachelor party in Las Vegas. Okay, here the pals – played by Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline – are past the age of 60, which seems as old as the been there-seen it feel of the picture. Critic Richard Roeper, Roger Ebert’s heir at the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote, “It feels a little bit like ‘The Hangover Part XXII,’ and I wouldn’t blame you if you felt as if you’ve seen the movie just by watching the trailer.”

In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott observed, “If you crossed ‘The Hangover’ with ‘The Bucket List,’ you might wind up with something like ‘Last Vegas,’” while on the opposite coast, Michael Phillips of the Los Angeles Times called the film “a genial ‘Hangover’ for the AARP set.”

Lest you think otherwise, “The Hangover’ was certainly not the first movie about a bachelor party gone awry in Las Vegas. In 1998, actor Peter Berg, best known then as Dr. Billy Kronk on the TV series “Chicago Hope,” made his debut behind the camera as the director (and screenwriter) of “Very Bad Things,” the blackest of dark comedies, featuring Christian Slater (“continuing,” in the words of one critic, “his decade-long Jack Nicholson tribute act”), Jon Favreau, Daniel Stern, Jeremy Piven, and Leland Orser as the carousing bachelors whose Sin City hijinks take a wrong turn when a hooker is accidentally killed. The ensuing comedy of errors escalates to the murder of a hotel security guard, corpse dismemberment, desert burials and exhumations, corpse reassembly, and more accidental deaths and murders until only the bride-to-be (Cameron Diaz) is left standing to care for a disabled Favreau and Orser, and an injured dog.

 

Before the body count: Jeremy Piven, Christian Slater, Jon Favreau,
Cameron Diaz, Leland Orser, Daniel Stern in "Very Bad Things"

Roger Ebert commented, “Peter Berg’s ‘Very Bad Things’ isn’t a bad movie, just a reprehensible one…If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you I don’t want to know.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin thought the film “is about as funny as the character who winds up a double amputee in its closing scene.” At the picture’s premiere, Peter Berg (who went on to direct “Friday Night Lights,” “The Kingdom,” “Hancock,” and, among others, “Battleship”) goaded the audience, “If this movie hits you, hit it back.” Whatever that means.

But we digress. Critic Leonard Maltin said of “Last Vegas,” “ I was fearful of a stupid and/or condescending comedy in the mold of ‘Grumpy Old Men’ – which I found pretty moldy. Indeed, this is a kissin’ cousin to that hit of twenty years ago, and has a predictable number of ‘old’ jokes, but it’s also fun to watch…more fun than I expected it to be.” On the other hand, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman noted, “The outline of the movie is basically ‘City Slickers’ meets ‘Grumpy Old Men’…” and called it “the sort of movie in which everything that happens is diagrammed, arced, and pressed through the gold-leaf cookie cutter of mainstream Hollywood comedy.” All manufactured and targeted for the 60-plus market, you know, the audiences who wonder, “Why doesn’t Hollywood make more movies like this?”

According to a 2012 study by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) U.S./Canada Theatrical Market Statistics, the 60-plus age group makes up 12% of moviegoers. (Incidentally, the largest segment of moviegoers is represented by the 25-39 age group at 23%.) Indeed, John Horn, writing in the Los Angeles Times, pointed out that “older moviegoers are usually treated as more of a box-office side dish, something that might just come along, than the main serving.”

 

Chill Wills, Pat O'Brien, Walter Brennan, Edgar Buchanan
in "The Over-the-Hill Gang"

“Last Vegas” certainly isn’t the first time Hollywood catered to the abovementioned “box-office side dish” by tossing together an ensemble cast of senior actors in a fabricated buddy movie.  A chestnut of a made-for-television western from 1969, “The Over-the-Hill Gang,” cast screen old-timers Walter Brennan, Pat O’Brien, Chill Wills, and Edgar Buchanan as former Texas Rangers who reunite to show the youngsters how to maintain law and order. The nostalgic helping of comfort food, costarring vintage burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, Andy Devine (fondly remembered as Buck, the reluctant reinsman in John Ford’s classic 1939 western “Stagecoach”), and perennial western bad guy Jack Elam, was a family-friendly antithesis to director Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked, elegiac western from the same year, “The Wild Bunch,” starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, and Edmond O’Brien as aging desperados, “out of step, out of place and desperately out of time.”

Walter Brennan, Fred Astaire, Chill Wills, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan
in "The Over-the-Hill Gang Rides Again"

Walter Brennan, Chill Wills, Edgar Buchanan, and Andy Devine returned in the 1970 TV movie “The Over-the-Hill Rides Again,” with Fred Astaire (as the Baltimore Kid!) replacing Pat O’Brien. Like its predecessor, and like every ensuing feature in the moviehouse on this outing, the cast of seasoned veterans appeared to be enjoying themselves and having more fun than the audience.

“The Wild Bunch’s” Ernest Borgnine was paired with Bette Davis as financially troubled senior citizens who disguise themselves as hippies and go on a crime spree in 1971’s “Bunny O’Hare.” (Borgnine and Davis had earlier costarred as the parents of Debbie Reynolds in the 1956 drama, “The Catered Affair,” scripted by Gore Vidal from a television play by Paddy Chayefskky.) The screenplay for this “’Bonnie and Clyde’ of the Geritol set” (as one reviewer put it) – originally titled “Bunny and Claude” - was co-written by Coslough Johnson, a writer for “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” who happens to be comedian Arte Johnson’s twin brother.

Bette Davis, who had script approval, was upset over post-production changes and sued the studio for damaging her career by altering the film into a slapstick comedy instead of the “humorous social commentary” for which she had originally signed.

 

Hardy Kruger, Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris
pose for a lobby card for "The Wild Geese."

A British producer named Euan Lloyd long desired to make a slam-bang, all-star action adventure the likes of 1961’s “The Guns of Navarone,” starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn, and 1968’s “Where Eagles Dare,” with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood – both based on rousing best sellers by Alistair MacLean – and in 1978, he rounded up past masters Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris, and Hardy Kruger as mercenaries in modern-day Africa in “The Wild Geese.”  (Because of their repute as hard-drinking carousers, both Burton and Harris had to promise the producer to drink only sodas during production.)

Roger Moore, David Niven, Gregory Peck in "The Sea Wolves"

In 1978, producer Euan Lloyd reunited “The Guns of Navarone” stars Gregory Peck and David Niven, along with Roger Moore, Trevor Howard, and Patrick Macnee, in “The Sea Wolves,” a geriatric guys-on-a-mission flick set, like “Navarone” and “Where Eagles Dare,” during World War II. Both geezer adventures “The Wild Geese” and “The Sea Wolves” were directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, a protégé of legendary director John Ford.

Lee Strasberg, revered as “the father of method acting in America” who became a director of the Actors Studio in New York City and helped mentor such Hollywood heavyweights as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino, dabbled only rarely as an actor before the cameras.

In 1953, the 52-year-old Strasberg debuted on the screen in a supporting role in “China Venture,” a B-movie suspense thriller directed by Don Siegel (who would go on to greater fame with “Dirty Harry,” “Charley Varrick,” and “Escape from Alcatraz”), featuring Edmond O’Brien, Barry Sullivan, Jocelyn Brando (Marlon’s older sister), Leon Askin (best known as the portly Gen. Burkhalter on TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes”), Dabbs Greer (most familiar as Reverend Alden from “Little House on the Prairie” but also recognizable for his role as an elder Tom Hanks in “The Green Mile”), Alvy Moore (the addled county agent Hank Kimball on the surrealistic sitcom “Green Acres”), and Philip Ahn (“Kung Fu’s” Master Kan).

Lee Strasberg, Al Pacino in "The Godfather Part II"

A little over two decades later, Strasberg, in his second screen role, garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his brief but instructional, this-is-how-you-do-it performance for acting students as the vitriolic Jewish mobster Hyman Roth in director Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II.”

George Burns, Lee Strasberg, Art Carney in "Going in Style"

In 1979, actor-turned-producer Tony Bill (who shared Oscars with co-producers Michael and Julia Phillips for “The Sting” as the Best Picture of 1973), tapped into the silver-haired chemistry of casting George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg as three senior roommates in Brooklyn who, bored with the monotony of cashing social security checks and feeding pigeons in the park, decide to “go on a stick-up,” in "Going in Style."

Director Martin Brest, who also wrote the screenplay for “Going in Style,” would go on to direct the hit action comedies “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Midnight Run,” along with such tedious, heavy-handed hokum as “Scent of a Woman” and “Meet Joe Black.”

Horror author Peter Straub’s best-selling novel Ghost Story was adapted to the screen in 1981, featuring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman as the sole, elderly members of a club called the Chowder Society in a small New England town, who gather to share ghostly tales and find themselves victims in a supernatural revenge plot stemming from a tragic accident they covered up a half century earlier.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Houseman, Fred Astaire,
Melvyn Douglas in "Ghost Story"

Neither Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, nor John Houseman had ever worked together in a movie before, and “Ghost Story” would be the last feature film for Astaire, Douglas, and Fairbanks.

The year 1983 saw another gathering of venerable talent in a things-that-go-bump-in-the-night thriller, “House of the Long Shadows.” Based on a cobwebby (literally as well as figuratively) play from 1913. “Seven Keys to Baldpate” (a perennial favorite for high school theater stagings), which was based on a novel by Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan. Desi Arnaz Jr. played a writer in “House of the Long Shadows” who wagers $20,000 he can hammer out a Gothic novel equal to Wuthering Heights while being holed up for 24 hours in a creaky Welsh manor.

The maestros: Christopher Lee, John Carradne, Peter Cushing,
Vincent Price in "House of the Long Shadows"

The tongue-in-cheek haunted house opus united Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and John Carradine in a once-in-a-lifetime cast. Lee and Cushing had starred alongside each other in numerous British horror pictures, particularly associated with Hammer Films, while Lee had a small role in 1969’s “The Oblong Box,” starring Price. Price and Cushing costarred in 1972’s “Dr. Phibes Rises Again” and in 1974’s “Madhouse,” and Price, Lee, and Cushing all appeared in 1970’s “Scream and Scream Again.” (The cast of “House of the Long Shadows” was also supposed to include Elsa Lanchester, the screen’s original “Bride of Frankenstein,” but the 81-year-old actress was too ill to participate.)

A retirement community of performers, including Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Jack Gilford, Maureen Stapleton, and Gwen Verdon, portrayed a select group of Florida senior citizens offered eternal youth and health by a race of benevolent aliens in 1985’s “Cocoon,” directed by Ron Howard. (The cast of seniors included Wilford Brimley, which was somewhat of a cheat, considering the actor was 50 at the time, although he had been playing grandfatherly types since the early 1980s.) Youngsters in the cast of “Cocoon” included Brian Dennehy, Steve Guttenberg, Tahnee Welch (Raquel’s lookalike daughter), and Tyrone Power Jr.

Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn, Wilford Brimley in "Cocoon"

The 77-year-old Don Ameche, who was a leading man in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, received his first Academy Award nomination for his role as the “adorably impish” and “dapper bon vivant,” in the words of the New York Daily News’ Kathleen Carroll, who “brings the house down with his gloriously triumphant breakdancing.” Fellow Best Supporting Actor nominee William Hickey (“Prizzi’s Honor”) told reporters, “I think Don Ameche will win it, and I think he should – 95,000 years in the movies.” Sure enough, the sentimental vote won out, and Ameche took home the Oscar.

Before announcing Don Ameche as the Oscar winner
for Best Supporting Actor, presenter Cher declared,
"As you can see, I did receive my Academy booklet
on how to dress like a serious actress."

The cast reprised their roles, along with newcomer Courteney Cox, in 1988’s “Cocoon: The Return,” but Ron Howard refused to have anything to do with the sequel because he felt the point of the first film would be squandered.

Movie legends Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas made a number of films together (most notably “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” and “Seven Days in May”) and became something of a screen team in the public’s mind. Their final picture together, 1986’s “Tough Guys,” was tailor-made for their disparate personas (director Jeff Kanew said, “Burt is the anchor and Kirk is the flier”), casting the two as 1950s gangsters released from prison after serving a 30-year sentence for hijacking a train.

Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas pose for a publicity photograph for "Tough Guys."

Lancaster is shuttled off to a retirement house, and Douglas suffers minimum-wage jobs at an ice cream parlor and restaurant. Ill-treated by the staff, Lancaster finds a little solace in the company of an old flame, while Douglas tries hard to adopt the New Wave lifestyle, donning ridiculously faddish clothes and working out to keep up with his new girlfriend, an aerobics instructor who is less than half his age. (Kirk’s boy Michael must have watched this performance for pointers on his role in “Last Vegas.”)

The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree: (top) pop Kirk Douglas, Darlanne Fluegel
in "Tough Guys"; (bottom) son Michael Douglas, Bre Blair in "Last Vegas"

Out of step with the times, the boys do the natural thing and return to a life of crime, culminating in a repeat of the railroad heist that sent them to prison in the first place. Along for the ride are Eli Wallach as an aging, myopic hitman still trying to fulfill a decades-old contract on the gangsters, Charles Durning as the cop who arrested them 30 years earlier, and a young Dana Carvey as a parole officer who treats the legendary outlaws more like heroes than charges.

Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Dana Carvey in "Tough Guys"

Despite tales of the fabled friendship between Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, one crew member recalled that they were “as different and night and day” and seldom spent time together off the set. Director Jeff Kanew confirmed, “Offscreen, they’re constantly bickering. They’re like an old married couple. They know how to push each other’s buttons. They’re like Laurel and Hardy with muscles.” Douglas later commented, “Some people think we’re the closest buddies. We’re not, though I think we have a wonderful friendship. Sometimes I don’t see Burt for a year or two, but he’s there if I need him and I’m here if he needs me. We have a respect for each other that we don’t voice.”

Lancaster was continually frustrated by the infirmities of aging, and he had a recurring problem memorizing dialogue. In the end, according to biographer Gary Fishgall in Against Type, “Lancaster decided he was too old for Kirk’s never-say-die approach. As Charles Durning put it, ‘Burt told me after ‘Tough Guys’ that he would never, ever do another picture with Kirk. He said, ”He’s a pain in the ass, and I can’t deal with it anymore. In my youth, I could deal with it, but I can’t deal it with it now.” ‘ “ When Douglas tried to coax Lancaster into joining him in a swashbuckling adventure about mercenaries in the Caribbean, Lancaster responded, “Kirk, for Christ’s sake, don’t you know our fans are happy when we wake up in the morning?”

Eli Wallach, Alexis Smith, Dana Carvey, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas,
Charles Durning, Darlanne Fluegel pose for a "Tough Guys" cast photo.

In fact, Lancaster was initially reluctant to sign on for “Tough Guys” until Douglas told him. “We have this relationship, and one day one of us is going to be doing the other guy’s eulogy, and we need to do this last film together.” Lancaster was hoping the film would address issues for senior citizens. “Nobody in our society wants to deal with older people,” he said. “They’ve outlived their usefulness and everyone wants to bring on the young…That was the underlying concept that appealed to me in ‘Tough Guys.’ That’s what takes it beyond farcical comedy.”

Unfortunately, when “Tough Guys” was released, Time magazine dismissed it as “ ‘Cocoon’ with cojones,” and a number of critics, according to Boxoffice magazine, were “downright angry over two screen greats in such a goofy piece of fluff.” “Watching Burt and Kirk is a joy,” Leonard Maltin wrote, “but the film gets more childish and predictable as it goes along.” Roger Ebert noted, “It treats these two guys like lovable old characters instead of listening to what they really have to say.”

Discussing another pair of screen legends, Roger Ebert wrote, “Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.” He was reviewing 1993’s “Grumpy Old Men,” the fifth teaming of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (sixth if you count “JFK,” although the two actors did not appear together), their first movie together since 1981’s “Buddy Buddy,” and a surprise hit at the box office.

Lemmon and Matthau portray onetime childhood friends, longtime next-door neighbors and lifelong rivals in Wabasha, Minnesota, who share a mutual passion for winter ice-fishing, along with bickering, insulting, pulling practical jokes on each other, and competing for the attention of a sexy new neighbor, played by Ann-Margret. An occasional glimmer of affection is allowed to shine through the ongoing bickering, reflecting the genuine friendship shared by the old pros.

"Grumpy Old Men" remains especially endearing to fans for the closing credit
outtakes, particularly those featuring Burgess Meredith as Lemmon's
foulmouthed, incorrigibly horny pop.

“Grumpy Old Men” was followed, in seemingly rapid succession, by three comedies that were more or less variations on the same theme: “Grumpier Old Men” (1995),  “Out to Sea” (1997), and “The Odd Couple II” (1998). In between, Matthau and Lemmon costarred in the 1996 drama “The Grass Harp,” based on the novella by Truman Capote and directed by Walter’s son, Charlie Matthau.

Both actors insisted that they never once had an argument in their 40 years of friendship. When Walter Matthau passed away in 2000, Jack Lemmon stated, “I have lost someone I loved as a brother, as a closest friend and a remarkable human being. We have also lost one of the best damn actors we’ll ever see.” Within a year, Lemmon, whom Matthau once described as “a clean-cut, well-scrubbed Boston choirboy with quiet hysteria seeping out every pore,” passed away. In The New York Times obituary, Aljean Harmetz wrote, “Mr. Lemmon always played the timid, neurotic schnook to Mr. Matthau’s tricky whirlwind. He was Stan Laurel to Mr. Matthau’s blustering Oliver Hardy and Bob Hope to Mr. Matthau’s smoothly conniving Bing Crosby.”

On the one hand, it might seem unfair to classify 1989’s “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” as a geezer buddy film, since most of the USS Enterprise’s stalwart crew were played by actors in their 50s (William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were both 58, Walter Koenig was 53, Nichelle Nichols was 57, and George Takei was 52), the exceptions being DeForest Kelley and James Doohan, both 69. However, the fact is that the intrepid intergalactic do-gooders never looked older or more in the way.

Leonard Nimoy directed two of the film franchise’s most popular chapters, “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” and subsequently received positive reviews for directing the 1987 comedy “Three Men and a Baby” and the 1988 drama “The Good Mother.” Perhaps a bit jealous, William Shatner thought he deserved his moment in the director’s chair, although he had only previously directed half a dozen episodes of his TV series “T.J. Hooker.”

Based on a story concept by Shatner, the plot of “Star Trek V” has to do with…oh, who cares? The point is, with Shatner at the helm, the antics aboard the starship repeatedly resorted to slapstick comedy, such as when a distracted Scotty (James Doohan) conks his noggin into a hardware fixture like Curly in the Three Stooges.

Speaking of Scotty, the scattershot screenplay for "Star Trek V" throws in hints
of a budding December-November flirtation between the ship's chief engineer
and the chief communications officer, Uhura (Nichelle Nichols).

(William Shatner has always patted himself on the back for boldly going
where no series had gone before when he lip-locked Nichelle Nichols
in TV's first interracial kiss on a 1968 episode of "Star Trek.")

“There haven’t been so many wrinkles on parade since the California Raisins,” reviewer Peter Travers wrote of "Star Trek V" in Rolling Stone. “But there’s nothing funny about the desperate way the old gang resists the fact that time goes by.” Commenting on how Shatner and Doohan “suck in their guts so often you fear they’ll hyperventilate,” Travers lamented, “What could have been a heartfelt valedictory to the troops in the September of their light-years becomes instead a losing battle to keep gray hairs, crow’s-feet and unsightly bulges at bay.”

In a jaw-dropping, are-you-serious moment, the script would have us believe
that an exotic double-moonlit fan dance by the half-naked, knocking-on-the-
door-of-sixty Uhura is erotic enough to decoy enemy aliens (careful -
turn down the lighting or else the cellulite will be all over the screen!).

What ultimately capsized the Enterprise in “Star Trek V” under Shatner’s command was the stupefying scene in Yosemite National Park, where, on a campfire–lit shore leave, Kirk and McCoy try to teach Spock the lyrics to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Roger Ebert aptly stated, “If there is a sillier and more awkwardly written scene in the entire ‘Star Trek’ saga than this one, I’ve missed it.”

James Garner, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland

Speaking of star treks, “Space Cowboys” (2000) featured Clint Eastwood (70), Tommy Lee Jones (54), Donald Sutherland (65), and James Garner (70) as onetime test pilots who, four decades earlier, were passed over as the first Americans in space when NASA replaced them with a chimpanzee. The four are reluctantly called back into service when an archaic Russian satellite left over from the Cold War threatens to enter Earth’s atmosphere.

Clint Eastwood, who also directed “Space Cowboys,” called the movie “something of a homage to those gentlemen” who “did all the pioneering in the 1950.” As for the characters’ senior status, Eastwood told an interviewer at the time, “I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel. I’m about 12 and the rest of the guys are about 14. None of us sit and dwell on the age thing, and this particular film does deal with a sort of resurrection of some people…It does have that sort of appeal – people getting a second chance in life.”

Unlike the desperately assembled hodgepodge of actors with disparate acting styles forced upon the audience as childhood buddies in “Last Vegas,” there is a natural, laidback camaraderie shared by the cast of “Space Cowboys.” This was the first time Eastwood worked with Jones, but the two “old farts” traded geriatric barbs as convincingly as lifelong cronies in rocking chairs on a general store porch. Eastwood comments on Jones’ “asymmetrical, sagging ass cheeks, love handles the size of Nebraska, and an oh-so-ugly ingrown toenail,” answered by Jones’ characterization of Eastwood as “this son of a bitch with the chicken gizzard neck and the face that looks like 30 miles of Death Valley fire trail.”

Youngsters Donald Sutherland and Clint Eastwood
pose on the set of "Kelly's Heroes."

Thirty years earlier, Clint Eastwood and Donald Sutherland were featured in “Kelly’s Heroes,” described by Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel as “a messily contradictory…muddle” of “an anti-war satire…a caper (or bunch-of-guys-rob-a-vault) comedy, an old-fashioned service (or bunch-of-goldbricks-goof-off) comedy and…a straight bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission piece.” Schickel reduced Eastwood’s presence to “essentially the straight man to the assembled pranksters,” which included Don Rickles, as the aptly named hustler Crapgame, and Sutherland, as the delightfully anachronistic hippie Oddball.  In an eclectic cast that included Telly Savalas and Carroll O’Connor, Eastwood said, “Our styles are inconsistent. People off on different trips. No cohesion.”

James Garner does his best to ignore the taunts of Clint Eastwood
in the 1959 "Duel at Sundown" episode of "Maverick."

As for Eastwood and Garner, both actors earned their spurs in the stampede of western TV series of the 1950s. On a 1959 episode of James Garner’s “Maverick,” a pre-“Rawhide” Clint Eastwood played a troublemaker named Red Hardigan who repeatedly taunts the gambler by calling him “Mav-rack” until Garner hauls his saddle-sore butt out of the saloon onto the dusty street for a frontier ass-whuppin’.

Released on the heels of “Space Cowboys,” “The Crew” (2000), a comedy about four retired mobsters who plan one last crime to hold onto their apartment in a Miami retirement complex, had the misfortune to be negatively compared to the earlier, superior film. The “grade-B ‘Space Cowboys’ cast” (to quote The Village Voice critic Nico Baumbach) features Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya, and Seymour Cassel as the wizened guys whose stunt gets them mixed up with a Columbian drug cartel.

Carrie-Anne Moss, Lainie Kazan, Jennifer Tilly, Jeremy Piven costarred in "The Crew."

“Elder abuse masquerading as light comedy” is how “The Crew” was described by A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin, who added, “Clearly designed as a crowd-pleasing cross between ‘Grumpy Old Men’ and ‘Goodfellas,’ ‘The Crew’ instead feels like a male ‘Golden Girls’ with a mob fixation…” Not at all coincidentally, the screenwriter, Barry Fanaro, who also co-scripted the Farrelly Brothers’ “Kingpin,” wrote more than 100 episodes of “The Golden Girls.” “Like that redoubtable show,” A.O. Scott noted in The New York Times, “ ‘The Crew’ aims to be a piece of genial old-timers’ slapstick.”

Roger Ebert wrote, “Comparing this to ‘Space Cowboys,’ I realize how much more heft and dimension the cowboys had…There is also the fact that Eastwood, James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland have built up goodwill and screen authority by avoiding movies like ‘The Crew’ instead of making them.”

Robert Loggia, Charles Durning, Burt Reynolds,
and Burt Reynolds' toupee in "Forget About It"

Six years later, Burt Reynolds returned in another tired crime comedy, 2006’s “Forget About It,” teaming with Robert Loggia and Charles Durning as a trio of retired military veterans who discover a suitcase of money that belongs to a gangster in the witness protection program. The website Why Does It Exist dismissed the movie as “a dumb mix of ‘Grumpy Old Men’ and ‘Analyze That,’” which “sticks to the tried-and-true formula of old men doing silly dances and making boner jokes…Raquel Welch shows up to dance around, Phyllis Diller makes out with a guy in assless chaps, Richard Grieco emerges from whatever depths he was hiding in and hilarity ensues.”

The director, a former stuntman named BJ Davis, tried to sue at least one internet critic for a bad review, but the genuine ensuing hilarity was when actor Michael Paloma, who portrays the mobster-in-hiding, embezzled money from the film’s budget and, in 2008, pleaded guilty to a multimillion dollar stock fraud in a scheme involving members of the notorious Bonanno crime family. Paloma was sentenced to ten years in federal prison and ordered to pay $7.8 million in restitution.

Haley Joel Osment, Michael Caine, Robert Duvall  in "Secondhand Lions"

As unlikely as casting grizzled Robert Duvall and Cockney Michael Caine as brothers might seem (how about Duvall and James Earl Jones as half-brothers, in the 1996 drama “A Family Thing”), that’s the case in the 2003 family drama “Secondhand Lions,” the cinematic equivalent to the kind of coming-of-age story you were assigned to do a book report on in a middle school English class. In what A.V. Club reviewer Keith Phipps called a “sweet lost-boy comedy,” Haley Joel Osment (“The Sixth Sense”) plays a 14-year-old introvert whose negligent mother dumps in the care of his bachelor great-uncles, a pair of reclusive eccentrics with a mysterious past that have may have seen them as soldiers in the French Foreign Legion and bank robbers with Al Capone who absconded with millions of dollars of cash.

“Just because something ain’t true,” Duvall says in the film, “don’t mean you can’t believe in it.” Roger Ebert observed, “ ‘Secondhand Lions’ is about the uncles every boy should have, and the summer every boy should spend. No uncles or summers like this ever existed, but isn’t it nice to think that Uncle Garth (Caine) and Uncle Hub (Duvall) are waiting out there on their Texas ranch, shooting at fish and salesmen…”

Throughout his career, Michael Caine, an actor stubbornly proud of his Cockney background, has endured unending flack whenever he attempts American dialects. In 1967’s “Hurry Sundown,” a lurid racial melodrama set in rural Georgia, costarring Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, and John Phillip Law, Caine played a bigoted factory owner who, according to critic Judith Crist, spoke “a dialect that out-Remuses the old Uncle himself.”

Michael Caine and Jane Fonda in the notorious "saxophone scene"
from director Otto Preminger's "Hurry Sundown"

In “The Eagle Has Landed,” a 1976 World War II espionage thriller with an all-star cast, including Robert Duvall (as a Nazi officer), Donald Sutherland, Jenny Agutter, and Donald Pleasence, Caine’s German accent as an undercover operative assigned to kidnap British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the England drifted all over the map.

Unlikely Germans Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Michael Caine
in a the likable, crackerjack thriller "The Eagle Has Landed"

According to all accounts, Caine does make an effort to study American accents (his painstakingly researched role as a New England doctor in 1999’s “The Cider House Rules” garnered him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) - which is more than can be said for his friend and continental neighbor Sean Connery, a now retired actor who, no matter the role – a Bronx convict, a Norwegian explorer, a Moroccan sharif, an Egyptian-Spanish swordsman, a Saudi Arabian minister, a Chicago street cop, a Russian submarine captain, or even a medieval dragon – didn’t bother to mask his Scottish brogue and burr, because he’s Sean Connery, dammit!

Not unlike Mr. Connery, Jack Nicholson rarely varied what has worked for him over the years, earning him a dozen Oscar nominations and three Academy Awards (he once declared he wanted to win more Oscars than Walt Disney), and that’s precisely what audiences got from his performance in 2007’s “The Bucket List,” directed by Rob Reiner. Nicholson plays a rich hospital magnate (a role allegedly offered to Clint Eastwood), and Morgan Freeman is a blue-collar mechanic, both of whom end up sharing a hospital room as patients with terminal lung cancer. Of course, they begrudgingly become pals, then embark on a worldwide vacation with a wish list of things to accomplish before they kick the bucket.

A.V. Club critic Noel Murray summed up “The Bucket List” as “a buddy picture, a ‘setting things right’ story, and a globe-hopping adventure all in one…” Murray wrote, “In a broader sense, Rob Reiner’s tear-jerking new serio-comedy ‘The Bucket List’ is pure hackery , cynically trotting out every cliché of the not-quite-prestige level crowd-pleaser.” On the other hand, Murray admitted, “There are certainly worse ways to spend the holiday season than in the company of two charming old actors, being reminded that human companionship makes life worth living, even as it makes dying a little tougher.”

In his review, Roger Ebert was not so sympathetic. Personally contending with thyroid cancer at the time, he commented, “ ‘The Bucket List’ thinks dying of cancer is a laff riot followed by a dime-store epiphany.” Giving the film one star, he dismissed it as “a movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.” Ebert did concede, “The sole redeeming merit of the film is the steady work of Morgan Freeman, who has appeared in more than one embarrassing movie but never embarrassed himself.” (Ebert passed away in the spring of 2013, seven months before the premiere of “Last Vegas,” but one can imagine the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic similarly singling out Freeman in that cookie-cutter ensemble cast.)

John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen, William H. Macy in "Wild Hogs"

The clichés rolled on in 2007’s “Wild Hogs,” a road comedy directed by Walter Becker (best known for the 2002 comedy “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder”) about four middle-aged Cincinnati suburban pals frustrated with their workaday lives who mount their Harley-Davidsons for a ride to California. Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone, “No cliché goes unloved” by a cast of professionals – Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy - who show absolutely no rapport nor share a shred of chemistry. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott noted, “Somebody needed to revise the ‘City Slickers’ formula,” while A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias observed that “basically the film is ‘City Slickers ’07,’ a harmless fish-out-of-water story about guys who find themselves by roughing it a little.”

A sequel to “Wild Hogs” had been planned but was scrapped after the commercial and critical failure of director Becker’s next project, 2009’s “Old Dogs,” a disappointing teaming of John Travolta and Robin Williams in what Roger Ebert called “a stupefying dimwitted comedy” about a pair of business partners who inexplicably become caretakers for seven-year-old twins.

Something about the eclectic cast of 2010’s action comedy “Red” – Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and the seemingly ubiquitous Morgan Freeman as ex-CIA agents deemed “retired, extremely dangerous” (RED) – clicked with audiences. Based on a popular “graphic novel” (comic book to us simple folk) and directed by Robert Schwentke (who went on to make the lifeless action-comedy “R.I.P. D.,” starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds), “Red” also featured Mary-Louise Parker, Richard Dreyfuss, and, in one of his final feature film roles, 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine.

Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, Bruce Willis,
John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Lee Byung-hun in "Red 2"

In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan remarked, “The film’s inescapable air of glib self-satisfaction is not only largely unearned, it’s downright irritating.” Nevertheless, the action comedy reaped $90 million domestically. The 2013 sequel, “Red 2,” reunited Willis, Malkovich, Mirren, and Louise-Parker (Freeman’s character had been dispatched by a sniper’s bullet in the original picture), and added Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones to the cast, but was a box-office disappointment, dubbed by Variety as “an obligatory sequel that can’t quite recapture the sly, laidback pleasures of its cheerfully ridiculous predecessor.”

Steve Austin, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Jet Li, Sylvester Stallone,
Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis in "The Expendables"

In his mid-60s, Sylvester Stallone, after resuscitating his two enduring screen personas in the back-to-back box-office hits “Rocky Balboa” (2006) and “Rambo” (2008), co-scripted, directed, and starred in “The Expendables” (2010), named for a team of elite mercenaries on a mission to topple a Latin American dictator, only to be – but then, who cares about the plot in an orgy of over-the-top, no-excuses, no-apologies, no-explosions-barred firefights featuring testosterone-fueled action figures of today and long-in-the-tooth masters of yesteryear, including Jason Staham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, and Mickey Rourke, with self-deprecating cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The entire cast, minus Rourke but with Willis and Schwarzenegger still in tow, returned in the 2012 sequel, “The Expendables 2” (above) along with newcomers Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Willis, Norris, and Van Damme will be missing in action in the upcoming “The Expendables 3,” but in their absence, a another bunch of oldhands have reportedly been rounded up, including Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, and Antonio Banderas, as well as Kelsey Grammer and Robert Davi.

The question arises in the moviehouse as to why Steven Seagal has never
been invited aboard the "Expendables" gravy train...Oh, that's why - never mind.

Postlude:

We used to have to endure these morning meetings at work, which concluded with management asking the line employees what the “takeaways” were. Maybe it’s an appropriate question here. Perhaps we learned that what works in – for lack of a subtler, more politically correct, or, at the least, more polite phrase – geezer buddy films is a genuine sentiment of camaraderie shared by the cast, something that can’t be pieced together on a factory assembly line.

The frightening grimace on Kevin Kline's face seems to say,
"They couldn't get Nicholson!" As a matter of fact, "Last Vegas,"
years in development, started as a project for Jack Nicholson...
Other actors considered were Billy Crystal, Dustin Hoffman, and
Willam Shatner.

When the four males stars of "Last Vegas"actors were asked by AARP magazine if they became "great friends playing great friends," De Niro replied, "Truthfully, you admire these guys from afar and hope it turns out..." Morgan Freeman said, "But you know actors. We come together...Let's face it, we're all pros...We get it done." Michael Douglas said, "After this, each time we see each other we'll have a smile. It'll bring back good memories, good times." In an interview for USA Weekend, Freeman said of his costars, "We may not talk again after the premiere. It's not like I'm going to call up Michael, Robert or Kevin and say 'Hey, just checking to see how you're doing?' They'll say, 'Hey, I'm busy.'"

Nonetheless, Chicago Sun Times critic Richard Roeper noted that “one can’t help but smile throughout, watching five Academy Award-winning actors (including Mary Steenburgen) breezing their way through an obvious but lovely and funny adventure.” However, A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsk, who graded the movie D-minus, wrote, “Steenburgen is appropriately alluring…and wasting her performance in a third-rate geezer comedy is downright criminal.”

As the sultry Las Vegas lounge singer Diana, Mary Steenburgen
enchants both Michael Douglas and Robert De Niro in "Last Vegas."

Overall, “Last Vegas” received mixed but kind reviews. Michael Phillips, of the Los Angeles Times, admitted, “ ‘Last Vegas’ is roughly what you’d expect, or fear, but a little better…We know, and like, the people on the screen…And if we settle for half a dozen good laughs, we’ll come out reasonably entertained.” Calling the experience a “chance to see five superb actors enjoying themselves as they cruise through an old-fashioned ensemble piece,” Richard Roper concluded, “What happens in ‘Last Vegas’ won’t stay with you forever, but you’ll walk out with a smile.” Leonard Maltin conceded that the film “allows us to spend time with four of the best actors alive – even if they never break a sweat.”

Postscript:

When A.O. Scott, a critic for The New York Times, grumbled, “A geezer comedy full of jokes that might have sounded tired at a ‘Dean Martin Celebrity Roast,’ the movie has no reason for existence and nothing much to recommend it,” we were nostalgically reminded of the cuckoo king of all ring-a-ding Las Vegas escapades, 1960’s “Ocean’s 11,” the Rat Pack masterpiece about World War II 82^nd Airborne veterans – played by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, Henry Silva, Richard Conte, Buddy Lester, Richard Benedict, Norman Fell, Clem Harvey - who plan to rob five Vegas casinos in a single night. And don’t think that “Ocean’s 11” wasn’t on the mind of the “Last Vegas” filmmakers…