Good Neighbor Sam Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Good Neighbor Sam Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 29, 2020

Whether they were around to actually see it broadcast during its one lone season on NBC, lovers of cult television trivia may know of a rather funny sitcom starring Michael Callan and Patricia Harty called Occasional Wife. The premise of this series was that the Callan character was attempting to become an upwardly mobile junior executive where he worked, but his lack of a spouse didn’t make him much of a “company man” in the eyes of the owner, and so Callan “hired” his upstairs neighbor in his apartment house, a beautiful young woman played by Harty, to pose as his, yes, “occasional wife”. If hilarity didn’t exactly ensue, the show was often rather charming and even sly, at least for a show that was airing during the relative “Dark Ages” of the 1966-67 television season. Occasional Wife is credited as having been created by Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman, but some pop culture archaeologists might wonder if the pair had taken at least a little inspiration from another veteran of the American sitcom, David Swift, one of the co-writers and the director of Good Neighbor Sam. Now, to be fair, Good Neighbor Sam was culled from a book by Jack Finney, so maybe that’s where the spark of inspiration began, but one way or the other, Good Neighbor Sam, while dealing with a whole interlocking and often very funny set of subplots, might quite easily have been accurately entitled Occasional Husband, since one of its main conceits is that an up and coming advertising executive named Sam Bissell (Jack Lemmon) is enlisted to impersonate the husband of his exotic neighbor Janet Lagerlof (Romy Schneider), who is in need of a spouse in order to claim a sizable inheritance. In this case, however, being an "occasional husband" may in fact put the kibosh on Sam's ambitions rather than helping them, due at least in part to the fact that Sam is already married to someone else.

One of the calling cards of classic farce is how the idiom tends to present a relatively "normal" situation, introducing a bunch of characters, and then adding element after element until chaos typically prevails. There's little question that Good Neighbor Sam is most definitely a farce (if you need proof of what Swift and his team aimed for, simply watch the completely gonzo, wordless, teaser trailer included on this disc, which features what look like snippets from a gag reel offering the stars making weird faces and the like). In this case Sam is, as is often repeated throughout the film, a "clean living family man", surrounded by his devoted wife Minerva (Dorothy Provine) and adorable children. The children are almost instantly shipped off for a vacation with grandma, who it should be noted drives a Corvette.

Minerva drives Sam into his San Francisco job, since she's scheduled to meet her old college friend from Europe, Janet Lagerlof, who just so happens to be moving in next door to the Bissells. In the meantime, Sam is proffered by his boss Mr. Burke (Edward Andrews) to a dairy products impresario named Nurdlinger (Edward G. Robinson) as the paradigm of a, yep, you guessed it, "clean living family man", since Nurdlinger has been threatening to take his advertising business elsewhere since he feels Burke's agency doesn't have the "right" (i.e., clean living family man) stuff. Unfortunately for all involved (mostly Sam), in true farcical fashion, Burke and Nurdlinger fall under the impression that Janet is Mrs. Bissell. And that's just the tip of an increasingly precarious iceberg which ultimately offers the revelation that Janet stands to inherit a 15 million dollar fortune (and that's 15 million in 1964 dollars, folks) if she is married (again, it was 1964). Her attorneys insist that even though she's officially divorced from erstwhile husband Howard Ebbets (Michael Connors), it takes a year in California law for the divorce to become final, so they can argue she meets the requirements. Inconveniently, though, two other prospective beneficiaries of the will show up, and so Janet needs a "stand in" for her husband, which is where Sam starts leading something of a double life.

Add in to this morass of mistaken identities and what amounts to a G-rated implication of wife swapping (after Howard enters the fray personally) some great sight gags, including a patently hilarious series of vignettes which may not resonate all that well with those younger than the Baby Boomer generation. Sam repeatedly finds himself on a soundstage where an attempt at filming one of the old circa sixties "let Hertz put you in the driver's seat" commercials is underway. There are some fun vintage examples of these old ads (where drivers would "fly" into their rental cars) on YouTube enterprising pop culture historians may want to explore, but the bottom line is the attempts go wrong every time. Part of the fun of these "recreations" is that they pretend a live jazz ensemble and the venerable close harmony group The Hi-Lo's are onstage doing their thing for the soundtrack of the commercial as it's being filmed. Just for good measure there's also an unctuous private detective named Reinhold Shiffner (Louis Nye) hanging around who has been hired by Janet's prospective inheriting relatives.

Good Neighbor Sam delivers its fair share of laughs, but for younger viewers in particular, it may be some of the film's "meta" aspects that are most interesting. The fact that this is based on a Jack Finney novel (!) may strike some as surprising, but in that regard it's perhaps salient to note that Finney seemed to have an affinity (a-Finney-ty?) for the advertising world, as some readers will no doubt remember the hero of Time and Again also worked in that field. Co-writer and director David Swift would also return to the world of corporate conformity and those wanting to be upwardly mobile in his film version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. (My hunch is the "Micheline" credited in this film as one of the film's costume designers was Mrs. Swift.) This is also one of the few films Romy Schneider made in the United States, and she reveals herself to be a rather facile comedienne.

Good Neighbor Sam Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Good Neighbor Sam is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Sony-Columbia have been typically reliable curators of their catalog product, but there are some image quality fluctuations here that keep this from attaining the top tier of transfers we've seen from the studio. As should be expected, the optically printed credits sequence that begins the film is a bit ragged looking, slightly faded and pretty grainy. Once things cut away from that, though, there is at least some improvement, with better clarity and some more saturated colors (especially reds and blues) in the first fifteen or so minutes of the film, in opening scenes that initially led me to believe this was going to be a relatively nice looking transfer all the way. Unfortunately, at around the 20 minute or so mark, things take a turn for the worse, with a noticeably less suffused palette and at times chunkier grain and less fine detail. The color saturation tends to ebb and flow for the rest of the presentation, and there are occasional, if typically very small, signs of age related wear and tear, mostly in the form of tiny scratches or flecks. Grain looks natural and I noticed no compression anomalies. My score is 3.25, with an understanding that there are variances at play here.

Good Neighbor Sam Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Good Neighbor Sam features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono track that is obviously inherently narrow, but which has considerable depth in terms of both music (the Hi-Lo's sound great in the would be Hertz commercials, and the film also features a bouncy theme by the reliable Frank De Vol which both calls back to his memorable theme for My Three Sons as well as presaging his theme for Family Affair), and occasional sound effects, like the goofy mobile Sam has built in his backyard. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout this problem free track. Optional English and French subtitles are available.

Good Neighbor Sam Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Teaser Trailer (1080p; 1:47) is frankly one of the weirdest teasers I've ever seen, and if this was the first way audiences heard of this film, it's not hard to see why it failed to ignite at the box office.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 3:19) is much more straightforward.

Good Neighbor Sam Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Swift and Lemmon came to this film after the collaboration on the previous year's Under the Yum-Yum Tree (which also featured a score by De Vol), and there's probably little doubt that when taken as a whole, Good Neighbor Sam delivers the comedic goods more surely than the 1963 "sex comedy". Lemmon evidently wasn't that fond of either of the films he made with Swift, but Good Neighbor Sam, while obviously a product of its time (perhaps most noticeably with regard to the ostensible Hertz commercials), still has some hearty laughs to offer. Video is somewhat variable here, but certainly watchable, and audio is fine. Recommended.