Word: tonto
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Harry and Tonto opens warmly and realistically as Harry, an elderly retired teacher, is about to be evicted from his apartment on New York's decaying Upper West Side. Along with his faithful cat, Tonto, he stands up to the police and the wreckers until his son arrives to hustle him off in embarrassment. After a few weeks spent living with his son's family, Harry realizes how many household problems he is aggravating and decides to visit his other children in Chicago and California. Writers Josh Greenfield and Paul Mazursky probably had King Lear's peregrinations in mind...
...closest they can come to understanding one another is argument; his son in California clutches him as his false glamor dissolves beneath him. Harry moves on, encountering young runaway girls, health food swindlers, and an Indian who cures his arthritis in return for an electric blender. He buys Tonto a Scotch in a Las Vegas casino and spends the night in jail for pissing into a potted fern in the lobby. In the end, Tonto dies and Harry is offered a chance to move in with a well-preserved widow in Miami. Life goes on; Harry finds...
...triteness is not the worst of Harry and Tonto's faults. Any film that aims at poignancy will spatter itself with bathos unless it is directed by a very skillful man indeed, and Mazursky is too heavy-handed to make it work. Harry and Tonto exploits old people and their problems for the sake of cheap tears and an occasional laugh. Too much of the movie's laughter is directed at Harry instead of against his tormentors. Harry seems ridiculous for urinating in the potted plant, not the police who arrest him. The only symptom of old age Harry displays...
HARRY'S MENTAL and physical fitness is the chief weakness of the film. Art Carney makes Harry lively, sharp-tongued, and open-minded; his performance is excellent but he does not portray an old man, only a young man who happens to be 75 years old. Harry and Tonto thus trivializes the problems of the elderly--the worst of them seems to be incontinence--and makes answers look too easy. If only our old people didn't have to face things like chronic illness and mental deterioration, the film seems to say, they could lead happy, useful lives...
...Harry and Tonto, even if it amounts to no more than evasive slush in the end, makes a few fine and accurate observations along the way. When Harry meets the other elderly tenants in his building they talk about the TV shows of the night before, since they all watch TV and usually choose the same shows. Harry's visit to a childhood sweetheart grown senile (Geraldine Page) is one of the few episodes in which the film touches base with reality. Joshua Mostel, as one of Harry's grandchildren, plays the role of a deadpan mixed...