"City Slickers" 1991

“City Slickers”

In 1991, Jake Gyllenhaal was eleven years old. He made his movie debut as Billy Crystal’s son. It probably didn’t hurt that his dad was a director and his mom a producer and writer.

He is featured in a great scene in which Crystal’s character, Mitch is visiting his son’s class for career day and starts to think about how fast life is going by.

Mitch Robbins: Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly. When you're a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?" Your forties, you grow a little pot belly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering "how come the kids don't call?" By your eighties, you've had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand but who you call mama. Any questions?

His friends decide he needs an adventure. So along with Bruno Kirby as Ed and Daniel Stern as Phil they make plans to go on a cattle drive. Now, past trips, such as running with the bulls haven’t gone well. They are also going through struggles themselves. Phil has lost his job and his wife after an affair with a grocery store checker. Ed is at a crossroads when his young wife wants to have a baby and he isn’t sure he can be a dad.

They soon meet Curly, played by Jack Palance. Jack won the best supporting Oscar for his role in this film. I remember watching him as he did his famous one armed push ups in celebration. I also loved Oscar host Billy Crystal’s quip about Jack Palance winning when he’d shared every scene with him.

This movie is definitely a coming of middle age movie. At the beginning of the movie it is Mitch’s thirty-ninth birthday. He isn’t sure what he wants or where he’s going. He says as much to Curly.

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean $hit.
Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"
Curly: [smiles] That's what *you* have to find out.

All the men in the movie make their journey. Mitch discovers that his family is his one thing. So he goes home to his wife and kids. The movie did well enough that they followed up with a lame sequel a few years later, even figuring out a way to bring back Jack Palance from the dead.

Jake Gyllenhaal has gone on to do a lot of great movies and was been nominated for his role in a very different western movie, “Brokeback Mountain”.

Solid debut in a good comedy. Jake was off to a good start.