Taglines: The comedy that fools around a lot!
The Last Married Couple in America movie storyline. Jeff and Mari Thompson have been married for fifteen years. Although their marriage is not perfect, they are seemingly happy in their married and family life. But all their married friends seem to be getting divorced or separated. These newly single friends try to convince both Jeff and Mari – together and individually – that divorce is the way to go.
Even if they do decide to remarry, it will be an inevitability that that marriage too will end in divorce. And divorce can even re-energize the love in an otherwise stale marriage. In light of these assertions by their friends, Jeff and Mari do evaluate their marriage. Their friends also place each of them in potentially compromising positions, despite the fact that they still are married. Will Jeff and Mari’s marriage be able to withstand all this outside pressure?
The Last Married Couple in America is a 1980 comedy film released in the US. It was directed by Gilbert Cates, whose most successful film Oh, God! Book II, was released in the same year. The film starred George Segal and Natalie Wood as a California couple in the late 1970s struggling to maintain their “happily married” status as all their friends begin to get divorces and seem to be caught up in the decadence of the sexual revolution and the “ME” era. This is the last completed theatrical release Natalie Wood made before her death in 1981.
Film Review for The Last Married Couple in America
Now here’s an appallingly dimwitted comedy. It’s about marriage, I guess, and about how so many people are getting divorced these days that if you find yourself still together after 20 years you can almost wonder if you’re “The Last Married Couple in America.” But the people in this movie seem so spaced out about why they’re married or divorced that the real miracle is how they lace their shoes in the morning.
There’s nothing more cloying than a film about “real” people in which the people talk like prisoners of a sitcom, and the plot is so painfully artificial that even the actors seem incredulous. But that’s what we have here. The plot’s so awkwardly put together we can almost overhear the story conferences on the sound track. The movie makes it necessary, for example, for the happily married couple to break up, and so they do, but there’s no reason for it and we’re never convinced that anything in this movie is inspired by any kind of authentic human motivation.
The last married couple of the title is played by George Segal and Natalie Wood. They live in one of those modest little $2 million Southern California homes where you can pack the kids off to the family wing and they’ll hardly even know there’s an orgy going on. He’s a professional man of some sort, and she sculpts – which means that there is a block of stone in the movie and once or twice she takes a lick at it with a chisel.
All of their friends are getting divorced, we learn. And most of them seem headed for the further shores of sex. There’s a hot-blooded divorcee (Valerie Harper) who’s always hot to trot, and an old plumber friend (Dom DeLuise) who’s married a hooker and becomes a porno movie star. And so on. Wood and Segal are bewildered by these salvos from the sexual revolution, until Segal succumbs to Valerie Harper’s charms, they head for a motel together, and, wouldn’t you know, it, he contracts VD.
The resulting scene in the doctor’s office is about as embarrassing as you can imagine, but then this whole movie is embarrassing, maybe because it has a smarmy attitude toward sex that’s just not convincing. To put it another way, what happens in this movie is a lot too kinky to be convincing, given the actors who are asked to involve themselves in it.
A comedy about the real hazards of marriage and divorce might have been very timely right now (and the presence of Natalie Wood reminds us of her last major movie appearance, in the similar but infinitely better “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”). But this movie doesn’t seem interested in real people with complicated problems. Instead, we get a sexual sideshow that culminates in an orgy in the living room, and of course the whole old tired cast of stock kinky characters is dragged in, including the macho biker in leather and the stripper with the backless dress. So what?
There is a sense in which Hollywood has just plain lost touch with life as it’s really lived, and this movie is depressing evidence of that. The title gives us a promising premise: We’d be interested in a movie about a marriage that’s survived and still works, especially if it gave us recognizable, plausible characters. But this movie just doesn’t.
The sexual events in the film seem drummed up out of the letters columns of swinger magazines. The sets look like sample rooms in furniture stores. The characters don’t live their lives, they survive sitcom plot checklists. This movie is almost a curiosity, it’s so removed from the tones and rhythms of everyday life.
The Last Married Couple in America (1980)
Directed by: Gilbert Cates
Starring: George Segal, Natalie Wood, Richard Benjamin, Valerie Harper, Dom DeLuise, Bob Dishy, Catherine Hickland, Marilyn Sokol, Priscilla Barnes, Arlene Golonka, Sondra Currie
Screenplay by: John Herman Shaner
Production Design by: Gene Callahan
Cinematography by: Gerald Hirschfeld
Film Editing by: Sidney Katz
Costume Design by: Edith Head, Vicki Sánchez
Set Decoration by: Lee Poll
Art Direction by: Peter Landsdown Smith
Music by: Charles Fox
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: February 8, 1980
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