HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK should have stayed in the “How ’bout this?” pitch phase. For some reason 1976 raised a squad of expensive period piece duds—The Great Scout And Cathouse Thursday, Swashbuckler, Nickelodeon, Shout At The Devil, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood, Voyage Of The Damned, The Message, The Last Tycoon. This good-looking (László Kovács cinematography one of its few plaudits) sputterbag could be found twitching at 48th place in the year’s pile, a $13,900,000 gross not making the suits at Columbia Pictures happy after a $7,000,000 investment (always double that and more for prints, distribution and advertising). Laughter was also thin with displeased critics and among those who made the misfire, with blame ricocheting as usual between director, writers, producers and stars. One of the headliners, a flushed James Caan, called it  “Harry and Walter Go to the Toilet”.

New York: the 1890’s. Third-rate vaudevillians and amateur shysters ‘Harry Dighby’ (Elliott Gould, mugging alert) and ‘Walter Hill’ (Caan) are jailed for their antics. Also locked up, in much more comfort, is public idolized bank robber Adam Worth (Michael Caine), who plans for his next job breaking into a super-secure bank in Lowell, Massachusetts. The dopes steal Worth’s blueprints, escape stir and end up competing with him to pull the heist. He has his expert crew; Harry and Walter have an array of misfits including ‘Lissa Chestnut’ (Diane Keaton), a newspaper editor with a crusader & underdog attitude.

The script was written by John Byrum (Mahogany, The Razors Edge) and Robert Kaufman (Love At First Bite, Freebie And The Bean) and then revamped to suit director Mark Rydell. Looking great and exuding confidence, Caine does his best, and Keaton works with a will, but the rest is forced, and Gould and Caan confuse charming with irritating. David Shire’s obnoxious music score bangs your ears with “THIS is FUNNY!” insertions fit for a kiddie cartoon. Arthur D.Murphy, writing for Variety, pegged it: “Every single creative person has previously accumulated some meritable work. The odds must be a million to one that, in a given project ensemble, they would all emerge at their worst. But it happened here.”

              Yep, “blackface” as a joke, in 1976

Painful, a ponderous 115 minutes in length, with Charles Durning, Lesley Anne Warren (28 at the time, in an interview later she said that after this she couldn’t get hired for years—ouch), Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, Burt Young (perhaps mollified by his Oscar nomination for the first Rocky), Val Avery, Michael Conrad, Bert Remsen (overdoing it), Ted Cassidy, Ben Davidson, Brion James, Maureen Arthur and Warren Berlinger. All to little avail. For the record, Caine’s character was named after the real Adam Worth (1844-1902), a criminal mastermind whose exploits in the States, Europe, England and South Africa impressed Arthur Conan Doyle enough to use him as the model for ‘Professor Moriarty’ in the Sherlock Holmes stories.