User Reviews

Despite its nudging, rambling title and Dustin Hoffman's mildly hippie appearance, "Who Is Harry Kellerman..." is a rather old-fashioned quest for one man seeking the Meaning of Life, which screenwriter Herb Gardner sees as being undermined by the inevitability of death. There are no pretenses here towards embracing a pseudo-hip scenario, and the lack of modish overtones keeps the film relevant and fresh. Hoffman plays an East Coast songwriter, currently being hailed by Time magazine as a prophet, who sees nothing meaningful in his existence, harkening back on his ordinary boyhood in order to make peace with the present. Accentuated by bursts of rock music, and defined by little bits of mordant truth, the film blessedly isn't a silly phantasmagoria, although some may see all this as a con--written by somebody who is out of step with the times (Gardner wrote the coy "A Thousand Clowns" after all). Yet, the movie manages a melancholic, sobering, almost disenfranchised tone, with director Ulu Grosbard mostly interested in revealing something tangible through his characters. Hoffman's Georgie Soloway can't enjoy living without relating it to dying, and so has suicidal flights-of-fancy, paranoiac personal dramas, and surreal sessions with a Viennese analyst. It's a good role for the star, while Oscar-nominated Barbara Harris is wonderful in the small part of a struggling actress who's still in love with 1957. It takes a while to get into the movie's groove, but there are worthwhile thoughts here, helped immeasurably by Victor Kemper's non-fussy cinematography and Grosbard's deep connection with the material. **1/2 from ****

Labeling this movie as ahead of its time would be a bit too generous. In truth, it was ahead of its time but missed the mark. With lots of cuts between fantasy and what is probably reality, the movie does take you into the head of a disconnected music star. The only trouble is that once we're there, ... then what? In this case, nothing much, and that's a shame. At one point Hoffman's character meets a woman more screwed up than he is, and he sets about to help her a bit. Their interaction is poignant, but the movie is mostly devoid of emotion. It's nice enough to watch Hoffman walk through this movie, but i really can't recommend it for much else.

Harry Kellerman was a most unfulfilling film for me, as unfulfilling as Dustin Hoffman found his life to be in this movie. Hoffman plays a successful rock composer who is going through a mid life crisis and finds all of a sudden in his middle Thirties he's not a really happy guy despite all the money in the world and the toys that money can buy. His best time is flying his private plane, talk about toys.

For some reason I couldn't get into this film or feel any kind of sympathy for Hoffman's character of George Soloway. Hoffman's best friend seems to be his analyst Jack Warden, hamming it up in his best Viennese accent. Dustin has more real and imagined time with Warden than anyone else in the film. In fact Warden functions as an alter ego for him, more inside his head than in real life on the couch.

The last straw for Hoffman seems to be some mysterious dude named Harry Kellerman who for some reason is calling up all of Hoffman's friends of both sexes and badmouthing him all over the place. As his relationships crumble all around him, Hoffman goes on a frantic manhunt for Kellerman.

With all the imaginary sequences in this film, if you can't figure out who Harry Kellerman is before a quarter of the film is over you haven't seen too many films at all. Think a kinder, gentler Fight Club.

Hoffman does the best he can to make some coherent sense out of his character, but in the end he's not someone I care terribly about. Rose Gregorio as his ex-wife, David Burns as his father, and Gabriel Dell as his cheerfully hedonistic songwriting partner are the best in the film.

Barbara Harris as a woman who seems to have as much angst as Hoffman got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, she lost in the Oscar sweepstakes to Cloris Leachman for The Last Picture Show, an infinitely better film. Harris's character is interesting, she represents a last chance for Hoffman at love. She has her problems, but without as much money, she seems to be coping a lot better. Another reason for me to not care about Hoffman's George Soloway.

The ambiance of the early Seventies rock scene is captured well. Would that George Soloway in Harry Kellerman be someone you could actually get worked up over.

Potentially brilliant character study misses the mark as Hoffman plays a successful singer/songwriter who ends up badly tormented. Excessive smugness permeates a otherwise well crafted, well mounted production. Clearly the filmmakers thought they had a important "statement" picture. Unfortunately the statement becomes evasive and eventually muddled. Worth seeing just for Hoffman, who gives one of his best performances

This is a difficult movie, but worth staying with if you like fully developed characters, emotional depth and you don't mind something outside the normal linear Hollywood story telling format. Dustin Hoffman gives a fine nuanced performance and Barbara Harris is wonderful as a vulnerable woman all too aware that she has lost her youth. Her performance is touching and every moment she is on screen shines with her unique brilliance.

If there were an award for "best opening credits," this movie would be my pick to win, with its quirky fantasy scene accompanied by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show's marvelous "Last Morning."

The mix of fantasy and flashback without explanation may turn off some viewers, as may the slow pace. It is not plot-driven, but is rather a character study. It also presents a picture of an period in America when modernity began to overtake traditional ways and values.

As a whole, I do not find the film to be one of Dustin Hoffman's best, but I would not have missed the haunting performance of Barbara Harris for the world. The rest of the supporting cast is also extraordinary, even including an unusual dramatic performance by Dom DeLuise, nicely done. Overall, worth seeing.

Georgie Soloway (Dustin Hoffman) is a Bob Dylan-esquire folk singer whose neurosis has sent him into drug addiction. He finds it hard to hold relationships for two reasons: 1) his own nature and 2) someone named Harry Kellerman keeps undermining his relationships.

"Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" is one of those movies where you're never sure about what you're seeing on the screen. Is it real or is it his imagination? And what about Harry Kellerman? Either way, it's a good look at how a mixture of neurosis and drugs can drive a person over the edge. Georgie finds that out to the extreme. Not exactly a masterpiece, but worth seeing.

Sometimes I am just sooooooo out of step with conventional movie wisdom. This is one of those movies that gets trounced every time it is mentioned by a critic or reviewer. But why??? It is funny, well-acted, moving, bizarre and the music kicks ass. Dustin Hoffman plays Georgie Solloway, a super-successful Bob Dylan-ish rock star who is going thru something of a mid-life crisis. A mysterious figure known as Harry Kellerman is spreading false rumours about him, sabotaging his personal and professional life. Solloway has no friends to talk to... just a shrink and, when he gets really desperate, his accountant (great scene with Dom DeLuise!) Okay, so maybe you hate Dustin Hoffman... or Bob Dylan... or movies about the problems of rich, successful people in general... how can you not love the heartbreaking performance by Barbara Harris? She was nominated for an Oscar for crying out loud (and it was a crime she didn't win, I tell ya). Don't listen to the nay-sayers... check out this wild and wonderful film!

This is a difficult movie, but worth staying with it if you like fully developed characters, emotional depth and you don't mind something outside the normal linear Hollywood story telling format. Dustin Hoffman gives a fine nuanced performance and Barbara Harris is wonderful as a vulnerable woman all too aware that she has lost her youth. Her performance is touching and every moment she is on screen shines with her unique brilliance.

Any movie that takes place over the course of just one day can tend to drag unless it's filled with non-stop action. This film is no exception. If you love Acting with a capital "A" over Action, this is your film.

What makes this a movie worth seeing are the actors; Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Harris, and Jack Ward all turn in supreme performances. Even the bit parts are well-written and equally well-acted. The dialogue is sharp, witty and sadly comic.

Dustin Hoffman plays a highly successful songwriter who suffers from insomnia and the dementia it brings as he looks back on the relationships he's had throughout his life, hoping to break his loneliness.

Hoffman does an excellent job of portraying a creative genius, one whose creativity is so abundant he seems unable to turn it off. In most of the scenes, Hoffman is strumming a guitar, singing under his breath, presumably writing a new song with each emotion he feels at any given moment. Because the music that flows through him occupies so much of his brain, he seems unable to focus on human relationships and by middle age the loneliness catches up with him.

Hoffman drifts in and out of reality. Deciding which scenes are real, and which are his imagination is up to the viewer. Or as Hoffman tells his psychiatrist "Why should I come back to reality? What's it ever done for me?"

It should also be noted that as much as Simon and Garfunkel did for "The Graduate," so does this film's soundtrack accentuate the overall feel of the movie with music from Ray Charles and Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.

This film is in the tradition of absurdist cinema, and suffers from some of the defects of that genre. Particularly in the first half it is very mannered and seems to revel in quirkiness for its own sake. But as the movie progresses it becomes much more relateable and, in many cases, quite affecting. Barbara Harris' performance marks this transition very obviously.

But what I think is important about this movie is that its narrative style and devices clearly were big influences on Woody Allen (particularly the integration of childhood memories with adult experience) and Charlie Kaufman (the use of absurdist devices to drive personal narrative). So in that sense it was quite groundbreaking.

Georgie Soloway (Dustin Hoffman) is a troubled highly successful singer-songwriter with his latest song rocketing up the charts. The movie starts with Georgie jumping off a building and then safely landing on his therapist's couch. He is facing a midlife crisis of existential angst while trying to uncover a hater named Harry Kellerman. Time is passing by. He is disengaged from his wife and his kids. He has meaningless sex with his girlfriends. He becomes taken with a fading actress named Allison.

The narrative is disjointed and surreal. There are some good scenes, some funny scenes, and some boring scenes. What it needs is something to drive him into his crisis and be the reason for the movie. The closest idea comes from the conversation with his wife Gloria. It's his kids but they're never on screen. They can't be his motivation if they don't have screen time with their father. In the end, the big reveal is a little confused. It's a big idea of self-destruction which needs more exposition. This has shades of euro art house. I just want to connect more with the character and his plight.

Harry Kellerman is the best portrait I have ever seen on celluloid of the inescapable nature of neurotic pain. The fixated, tortured soul--albeit tortured on the small, inner scale of suffering--awakens to his pain, sees a possible escape route, and struggles to hurl himself through it. But then he only finds himself bank again at square one, the tether of his Gordian knot unbroken and unfrayed. Told with humor and absurdity appropriate to the subject matter, Harry is a delightful, original, and insightful movie.

I just watched this last night. I bought it because Barbara Harris received an Oscar nomination for it. I happen to think that she is a very underrated actress.....and was I right!

This movie started out very strange. From the opening scene where Hoffman falls of the top of a building, it just got stranger. I realize that this is one of those independent films that try to make a point about life in a different way than we're use to in mainstream films, but please! I knew this film was bad when I kept thinking to myself, "When does Barbara Harris come into this?!"

My husband had come home, watched a little and said, "What is this? Turn it off!" Just then Barbara Harris came on. We both sat there in awe. She made that audition scene into brilliant showcase of her talent. When Dustin Hoffman left her, you really missed her. The film really missed her. SHE is what makes this film worth seeing, well the last half at least. Dustin gives his typical performance here, nothing special. Barbara Harris is fantastic and deserved an Oscar for making it worth the torture of watching the first half of this @$%#^%, so you can see HER in the second half.

Aside from an excellent and Oscar-nominated performance by Barbara Harris, this film is a long slog, a sort of stream of consciousness miasma with Dustin Hoffman playing a Bob Dylan type songwriter, one who's in every minute of the film and who also sings some incredible drivel written by Shel Silverstein ... not a winning combination.

Hoffman carries his "axe" with him so he can break out in some tuneless and banal song at the drop of a hat. He's in therapy with a strange doctor (Jack Warden) who seems to intrude into Hoffman's sleepless dreams as he recalls various moments from his life, mostly of women he's been involved with. Talk about a vanity production! Herb Gardner wrote this mess and Ulu Grosbard directed. Hoffman seems terribly miscast, Dylan thing aside. Harris is quite wonderful as a lost soul. There is also good work in smaller parts by Rose Gregorio as the ex-wife, David Burns and Betty Walker as the parents, Dom DeLuise as the accountant, Regina Baff as the first love, and Gabriel Dell (yes, the old Dead End kid) as the writing partner. The main problem is Hoffman's protagonist: he's totally unappealing in every way.

Pretentious beyond belief, and the ending is quite unsettling (and I don't mean the no-surprise reveal).

From the first five minutes of the movie I knew it was going to be a long one. I was right. The plot seemed to drag on on for 3 hours and not enough coffee could help the matter. Although Mr. Hoffman does give an all-out performance (doesn't he always?) as Georgie Soloway, he just barely shines through the long-winded plot. Three things about this movie lend me the ability to give it a 10. Seeing Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show (I own their fan club) on stage with the genius of Shel Silverstein and Mr. Hoffman. The 3 of them together permit me to vote this movie a 10 no matter how much it needs the help of a decent writer. Hoffman gives a wonderful show as the highly intelligent, highly proficient, but obviously insane Georgie Soloway. Dr. Hook sing the opening and closing tracks and a song done onstage with Shel and Dustin named, "One More Round" amongst other tracks. Keep your mind open and concentrate on the performances of Hoffman, Silverstein, Dr. Hook, & Dom Deluise...and you'll be fine.

Jack Warden is great in many scenes, especially in the scene where he imitates Harry Belafonte saying "Daylight come and me wan' go home, tally me banana". Then the scene in the endless tunnel, when the same Jack Warden, now in police uniform, asks him for 50 cents, is cool. But the revelation of the film is Julie Harris! The audition scene and the scene after are two of the best scenes in the entire history of the film. Dustin Hoffman is just OK, he is much much better in "The Graduate", "Midnight Cowboy", "Marathon Man", "Straw Dogs", "Alfredo Alfredo". Very good Regina Baff as Ruthie Tresh, very good Rose Gregorio as Gloria Soloway. Dom DeLuise, an excellent comic actor in other films, here has a small and insignificant role. People did not understand and did not appreciate this film at its true value. They did not understand the message, which is a simple one: the impossibility of finding love and the great difficulty of really communicating between people. It deserves 10 stars, not just 5.

This odd, offbeat film is a true cultural artifact of its time -- the turbulent, disorienting, angst drenched brief period of transition from the exuberant, flowery, naive 60s to the cold, crass, furiously superficial 70s. Tough times, emotionally and psychologically, for anyone who was paying any kind of attention to the rapid evaporation of that quaint, doomed-from-its-birth concept popularly advertised as "The American Dream." In other words, this weird movie is an artified expression of that outrageously surreal absurdity that we know and fear as Reality. Heavy, man.

Sure, Dustin Hoffman is thoroughly captivating, radiating his signature brand of endearingly charming neurosis as Georgie Solloway, a Dylanesque Folk/Pop Singer/Songwriter Star; a sort of hippiefied, odder, more troubled Woody Allen vibe. New York City just seemed to be rife with these kind of semi-tragic self absorbed antihero types whose only superpower is blunt unfiltered honesty. Trainfulls of 'em zigzagging across town and zipping up and down the island, like motorized armadas of nervous nutty nebbishy nobodys. Except Georgie is a Somebody.

And then he meets his perfect match in the delightfully distracted, lovely lady Allison played brilliantly by Barbara Harris. Allison's a singer/actress, of course, who hasn't had a linear (boring) thought in probably 1,000 years. She's a force of nature in a miniskirt, if nature lives in a 5 story walkup on the Lower West Side. Georgie and Allison chat aimiably about death and tedious trivialities, as well as about the weight of their own individual private universes. It's often fascinating conversation and almost just as often mind numbing, in a strangely delicate, sweet way.

He trusts his psychoanalyst/therapist of 7+ years, played by the always solid and impressive Jack Warden, who happens to be an accent hopping Sigmund Freud wannabe, at least in the clouded, warped eyes and mind of poor struggling Georgie. It's a fun conceit, and Georgie even hallucinates his doctor suddenly breaking out in a musical number that has him pleasantly exclaiming just how sick he is of listening to Georgie's neverending tales of woe. It's very funny.

Georgie's frequent suicide fantasies are sprung on us with little or no warning, the cummulative effect of which leaves us nearly indifferent to the prospect that he may actually go through with it soon enough. It's a genuinely peculiar emotional limbo that we're placed in by all the wild, wacky, frantic shennanigans, one that doesn't fully reveal its profound psychological impact till well after the end credits have run. Perhaps days later.

In fact, the ending is so confidently content to leave us unsure of just what the holy heck we've been gawking at for the past 108 minutes, it all ultimately actually seems to somehow make sense. Somehow. Sort of... Don't think about it too much, it'll only drive ya nuts.