Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

bkoganbing House Calls is a nice romantic comedy about two mature people finding each other the second time around. Of course both Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson have spent a lot of time looking especially Matthau.Matthau is a doctor at Kensington General Hospital in Los Angeles who is just back from a leave of absence for a few months. He's a widower and after the proper mourning period has gone a nice hedonistic binge in Hawaii and is now back. He spots Jackson as a patient at the hospital and sees what he considers an egregious wrong done by her doctor. Matthau corrects it and earns the wrath of the chief surgeon Art Carney.Jackson is a divorcee with a teenage son who left her husband because she was tired of him pursuing as she puts it 'the all American humping record'. They're different people but Jackson and Matthau hit it off even though the road to romance has a few potholes.House Calls is as much a romantic comedy as a satire on American medicine. It's a subject that Matthau and Jackson have very diametrically opposed views. Jackson thinks that all doctor ought to be Albert Schweitzer and that just doesn't happen in the real world.No budding Schweitzers at Kensington General. Art Carney is absolutely brilliant as the over aged Chief of Surgery who is having touches of senility, but won't retire. Funny, but a bit frightening as well. I suspect there are more Carneys out there than one would like to admit.Some of the other staff includes as doctors Richard Benjamin, Gordon Jump, and Dick O'Neill. Candice Azzara has a juicy role as a widow wanting to sue for malpractice on the death of her husband. Guess who gets the dirty job to woo her a bit?House Calls succeeds quite nicely as romance and satire not an easy combination to pull off.

moonspinner55 Near-wonderful mixture of comedy, romance, and medical chaos has a 50-ish swinging-single doctor, tired of going to rock concerts with nubile airheads, dating a patient his own age whom he met on his rounds. Screenplay by Julius Epstein shows a fair amount of sophistication, though he doesn't have enough material to fill out the picture's last third, and one can almost feel the movie slipping. The subplot about the hospital being investigated for its shoddy business affairs isn't worked out satisfactorily, and it feels highly concocted anyway. Still, Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson are a terrific team, Richard Benjamin and Art Carney very funny in support. Director Howard Zieff keeps it all popping, and even when Epstein's one-liners feel like Neil Simon rejects, Zieff zips right along happily. The results are dryly engaging and occasionally quite sweet. Followed by a failed TV series. *** from ****

Ed Uyeshima I remember seeing this 1978 comedy at one of the bargain matinees I took in when I was looking for a study break from my college courses. Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson do some effective Tracy-Hepburn-style thrusting-and-parrying in this featherweight romp directed by the reliable Howard Zieff (he did "Private Benjamin") about a newly widowed doctor's aggressive re-entry into the dating game. It all breezes by quickly primarily thanks to the clever script by veteran screenwriter Julius J. Epstein ("Casablanca") along with Alan Mandel, Max Shulman and future director Charles Shyer.Dr. Charley Nichols has just come back from Hawaii after his wife's death. Upon his return, he becomes aware that he is instant catnip to any and all the single women in LA. He works in a hospital run by an increasingly senile chief-of-staff, Amos Willoughby, whom Charley has to pacify to keep his residency. Enter Ann Atkinson, a transplanted Englishwoman who bakes cheesecakes for a living and has certain concrete opinions about the medical profession, which she expresses freely on a PBS talk show. Of course, Charley is on the show's discussion panel, and sparks, as they say, fly. This leads to the standard complications about how serious Charley is willing to become about Ann. At the same time, the hospital has to deal with a potential wrongful death lawsuit from the widow of a rich baseball team owner who died at the hospital under Willoughby's careless supervision.It's just refreshing to see such a mature yet bracing love story between two characters inhabited by actors who deliver lines with the scalpel-wielding skill of surgeons. Matthau is his usual 1970's curmudgeonly swinger and quite a sight waddling with his gangly arms held akimbo in his power walk. Away from her heavy, award-winning Elizabethan roles, Jackson is crisply sardonic and charmingly vulnerable as the feisty Ann, who thinks all doctors should aspire to be Albert Schweitzer. Art Carney plays Willoughby with predictable bluster, while Richard Benjamin provides amiable support as Charley's colleague, Dr. Solomon. It's all very compact with a few nice jabs at the greed within the medical profession. There are no extras on the 2005 DVD.

MidniteRambler Matthau is a widowed hospital doctor enjoying his single status and the footloose and available nurses on the staff whilst colleague and friend Richard Benjamin looks on with amusement and amazement. Their boss is hard-of-hearing going on senile Chief of Staff Art Carney who is up for re-election to that post.Matthau is content playing the field without commitment until he meets single mother Glenda Jackson who insists upon being the only woman in his life while she is in his life. At the same time, he comes under pressure to respond to the amorous advances of a potential litigant in a malpractice suit, and to support the shambolic and incompetent Carney in his attempt to be re-elected Chief of Staff.This is a superior old-fashioned romantic comedy graced by four Grade-A actors and an excellent supporting cast working with a first-rate dry, caustic and sarcastic script. Carney steals every scene he's in and, in the parlance of IMDb, has us rolling on the floor laughing out loud whenever he appears on screen. We are otherwise entertained by the on-off relationship of the two leads and various sub-plots.Lacks the ambition to be a great film, but remains one of the best of its kind and watchable and re-watchable for its comedic value alone. Deserves more attention than it seems to have received and well worth the cost of the DVD or video cassette.