HOO-BOY, COLUMBUS

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1969)
dir:Larry Peerce

MAD#131, December 1969
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

The movie has that title because of the brother playing footage of old basketball games from his days at Ohio State.

It starts at a country club with Neil Klugman (Richard Benjamin) visiting a country club with a guest pass from his cousin. There he meets Brenda Patimkin (Ali McGraw) who asks him to hold her glasses while she goes swimming, despite the fact that she doesn't wear them throughout the rest of the movie.

After dinner with his family in the Bronx, Neil asks Brenda out, then drives to Westchester County to meet her after she's had a tennis game. She's rich and embarrassed my her nose job, but they begin dating.

He and She was Benjamin's short-lived sitcom the previous year. By "short-lived", with three networks in 1969, a TV show had more than 25 programs a season and 30 million viewers was considered low in the ratings.

Neil meets Brenda's family over dinner at her home. They're very rich. It consists of the mother (Nan Martin), the little sister, the father Ben (Jack Klugman, only a co-incidence he has the same last name), and brother Ron (Michael Meyers). Brenda's a college student and Neil works at the library.

Neil watches Brenda's sister Julie (Lorie Shelle) one day, playing ping-pong with her in their basement. He continues his romance with Brenda, her parents aren't sure he's right for her but agree she's just going through a phase. They leave a college party one night and the parody ignores that she skinny-dips in the pool. Neil's parents are always away and he moves in temporarily with the Patimkin family. They don't know he sneaks into Brenda's room and they have sex every night.

Ron recently graduated from college and works at his father's business. He gets married and there are all sorts of scenes at a Jewish wedding.

This parody has Dustin Hoffman from The Graduate at the wedding. Everybody suggests Brenda's next to be married and her father tells her she can have anything she wants, which is meant to imply that she can do better than Neil. When Neil goes to visit Brenda at Radcliffe and they rent a hotel room, she confesses her parents found her diaphragm at home and they break up. The parody has her marrying Philip Roth, who wrote the book Goodbye, Columbus was based on.

From Academy Awards for Adult Movies in the next issue written by Larry Siegel and also drawn by Mort Drucker. The host is Dustin Hoffman. The other nominees are Raquel Welch, though she was not in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (which as far as I know, had no nudity) and Vanessa Redgrave for The Loves of Isadora.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS
Sick #71, November 1969
w: Bill Majeski

There was later a movie based on Portnoy's Complaint where Richard Benjamin plays essentially the same character, which is parodied in Deconstructing Harry.