The Lonely Guy

    The Lonely Guy
    1984

    Synopsis

    A writer for a greeting card company learns the true meaning of loneliness when he comes home to find his girlfriend in bed with another man.

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    Cast

    • Steve MartinLarry
    • Charles GrodinWarren
    • Judith IveyIris
    • Steve LawrenceJack
    • Robyn DouglassDanielle
    • Merv GriffinHimself
    • Joyce BrothersHerself
    • Candi BroughSchneider Twin
    • Randi BroughSchneider Twin
    • Julie PayneRental Agent

    Recommendations

    • 60

      Variety

      Martin’s trademark wacky humor is fitfully in evidence, but seems much more repressed than usual in order to fit into the relatively realistic world of single working people.
    • 60

      Washington Post

      Despite the flailing around, the picture fitfully accumulates a handful of modest highlights and silly brainstorms. [03 Feb 1984, p.E6]
    • 60

      The New Yorker

      This comedy has some wonderful gags and a lot of other good ideas for gags, but it was directed by Arthur Hiller, who is the opposite of a perfectionist, and it makes you feel as if you were watching television.
    • 50

      Chicago Reader

      The film gets in trouble, as most contemporary comedies do, when it runs out of disassociated gags and casts about desperately for a story to tell; here, the lonely guy premise is dropped completely for a series of more-or-less conventional romantic misunderstandings centered on a dull Judith Ivey.
    • 50

      Miami Herald

      There is more truth to the lives of people alone than Hiller and his writers have cared to admit, and, consequently, more humor. The Lonely Guy is short on both. [31 Jan 1984, p.B5]
    • 50

      The New York Times

      If you can get past the movie's aimlessness and its visual drabness, it has its share of isolated laughs.
    • 50

      The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

      Mostly I laughed at the idea that Steve Martin could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy, and that Arthur Hiller, who directed this, or Neil Simon, who adapted it, or Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, who wrote it, could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy. [28 Jan 1984]
    • 40

      Empire

      Wildly uneven, but funny in a bittersweet tittery sort of way in places.