Lost and Found (1979)

I was not a fan of Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class, which made a lot of money and was lauded by critics back in ‘73. People seemed to love the comic energy of the movie, which coupled a nice family man (George Segal) with a flirty dress designer (Glenda Jackson) who fall in lust and eventually, inevitably fall in love. As a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s, I found it rather irritating despite its four Oscar nominations and his Best Actress win for Jackson. Still, I get where people loved it.

But I concede that is a glittery masterpiece compared to the dumb, dreary reteaming of Segal and Jackson called Lost and Found which, trust me when I say, is more the former than the latter. What a dumb, stupid, ill-conceived chunk of unfunny nonsense, which casts Segal as a college professor and Jackson as a divorcee who are (separately) on vacation in Switzerland where the comic conceit is that they keep running into each other – literally and metaphorically. Their cars collided, and later they run into each other on a ski slope and both break their legs.

Over and over, they keep getting pulled apart and pulled back together again, they get married but find themselves separated. What is happening here? Did this movie never get out of the concept stage? What is Melvin Frank doing with this material? What am I doing wasting another word on it?