Hoping to impress his girlfriend Becky, Boston architect Newton Davis designs and builds a new house for himself in his home town. He takes Becky to see it and proposes marriage to her. Becky's response is not what he was hoping for. She not only turns down his marriage proposal but also ends their relationship.

A few months later, Newton meets an attractive waitress named Gwen, seduces her and then abandons her after a one-night stand. That, however, is not the end of the matter. Gwen knows about the house Newton built for Becky, currently standing empty, and decides to move in. She starts furnishing it, explaining to everyone, including Becky and his parents, that she is Newton's new wife. When Newton turns up, he is naturally shocked to discover Gwen living in his house and pretending to be his wife, but he agrees to go along with her deception, hoping to win Becky back by arousing her jealousy. The plan is that he and Gwen will pretend to be married, then pretend to quarrel and get divorced, leaving him free to get back together with Becky. The plan works; Becky begins to take a renewed interest in Newton now that she believes him to be a married man. A complication arises when Gwen and Newton fall for one another.

This is not, of course, a plausible scenario. Those who condemn the film because of its lack of realism are, however, missing the point. "Housesitter" is not meant to be a work of social realism, but a screwball romantic comedy, a genre which has always allowed film-makers a certain freedom to depart from strict verisimilitude. What matters is not whether the scenario is one that would be likely to occur in real life but whether the actors can persuade us to believe in it. And that is precisely what Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, both very experienced in romantic comedy, manage to do.

Hawn is particularly effective in this film. Looked at objectively, Gwen ("the Ernest Hemingway of bullsh*t") is a quite appalling character, a compulsive liar who from the beginning of the film to its very end appears to live in a fantasy world. When we first meet her, she is pretending to be Hungarian (actually, she is from Toledo, Ohio). With the last line of the film, she tells Newton that her real name is not Gwen but Jessica. (To avoid confusion I will refer to her as Gwen throughout). At one point Newton ends up punching a totally innocent stranger because of a false story Gwen has told about him. Hawn, however, manages to make her curiously likable, another incarnation of the zany, eccentric but lovable and sexy girl she has played in numerous films going back to "Cactus Flower" in the late sixties. (Remarkably, she was in her late forties when she made "Housesitter", but still looked youthful and attractive enough to get away with playing a role like this).

There is, however, more to "Housesitter" than another kooky Goldie Hawn blonde. The film raises some surprisingly deep issues about the nature of reality and the ethics of truth and lies. Gwen's motive for pretending to be Mrs Newton Davis goes deeper than a wish to live rent-free in a big house for several months. She is in search of a life for herself. We learn that she is illegitimate and from a poor background, that she has never known her father and that she has worked in a series of dead-end jobs. Given that Newton's home town is the sort of picture-postcard New England village, complete with church, village green and weatherboarded houses, where it always seems to be a beautiful autumn day, it is hardly surprising that this is the sort of lifestyle she covets. Moreover, she sees in her supposed "in-laws", George and Edna, the parents she never had. Although they have had their differences with their son in the past, they are basically kindly and decent people.

Gwen is not the only person desperate to find a new life. Confronted with the need to produce her parents (about whom she has told a long string of falsehoods),Gwen turns as a last resort to Ralph and Mary, a pair of down-and-outs she knows from her days as a waitress. At first they are reluctant to impersonate Gwen's parents, but quickly grow into their roles, Ralph doing it so well that he even convinces Newton's autocratic boss Moseby that the two of them fought in the same unit in the Pacific.

Newton too is in search of a new start in life. Although Gwen initially sees him as a typical urban professional ("you're so average") she comes to realise that he is, at heart, a dreamer, a man yearning for something that goes beyond his daily routine. He dares, for example, to tell Moseby that their practice should try designing more imaginative buildings rather than repeating the same formula every time. Gwen finds that an attractive quality, whereas the more prosaic Becky rejected him for precisely that reason; she lacked the courage to marry a dreamer.

As the film progresses, the lies told by Gwen and Newton become ever more complex, until it seems that they have created a vast, baroque structure of untruths that feels like it is about to come crashing to the ground at any minute. Yet the film does not take a strictly moralistic position about truth and falsehood. There is a happy ending for the two liars, whereas the more truthful Becky is left out in the cold, a victim of her own lack of moral courage. There is no absolute difference between a liar, a fantasist and a dreamer. As Newton says "Half the things we tell ourselves are fiction". That may be an unusual moral position for a film to take, but it helps to lift "Housesitter" above the average rom-com. 7/10

It's not the most memorable comedy with either of it's two stars, nor did it get more than mediocre reviews when it came out, but HOUSESITTER is actually quite an interesting comedy. It certainly is much more than the one joke everyone who critiqued the film jumped on.

At the start of the film, Newton Davis (Steve Martin) is taking his long-time fiancé (Becky Medcalf - Dana Delany) on a car ride where Becky is blindfolded. Newton has promised her a surprise. He drives her to the surprise, and she takes off the blindfold. It is a two story, specially designed private home that he has built for her, and has even put a huge ribbon around for her to pull off while he proposes marriage to her.

The house with the ribbon around it is the joke that was pinpointed by the critics as the best gag - and it was done too early they claimed. Actually it was done pretty well. For Becky is speechless, until she explains to Newton that she wants an end to their dating and sexual relationship. As this ignores the expense and time of Newton in creating and building that house, her announcement that their relationship is over demolishes him.

Returning to Boston and feeling dejected, Newton goes to a dinner at a Hungarian Restaurant in honor of the head of the architectural firm (Roy Cooper)that ends in quasi-disaster when Newton gets his boss angry. As he tries to pick up the tatters he has left, he talks to a waitress named Gwen Philips (Goldie Hawn) and mentions the house he's built. Gwen (who has had problems with her boss, which has just cost her her apartment),realizes that Newton has given her a possible place to reside in for awhile. So she moves to the house. And she soon is acquiring credit with various local townspeople claiming that she and Newton have married and she's setting up the house.

Newton also heads for the house, debating on when he can sell it or tear it down. He's surprised to get dozens of congratulations for his marriage, and when he confronts Gwen she offers him a deal. He still wants to win back Becky (who is astonished that he has gotten married so quickly). Gwen will remain his "wife" as long as possible for him to make Becky jealous and willing to marry Newton (once he gets a "divorce").

It's interesting to compare this fake marriage with INDISCREET, CACTUS FLOWER, and OVERBOARD. In the first Cary Grant made up a non-existent wife so he could have an "above-board" romance with no strings attached with Ingrid Bergman,but when she learns of it she teaches him a lesson by pretending she's been carrying on with an old flame. In the second Walter Matthau invents a non-existent wife for a similar reason to romance Goldie Hawn, but when she reveals the depth of her love for him coupled with her insistence that her husband has to be truthful, Matthau has to make his nurse/receptionist (again Ingrid Bergman) his "wife" in order to create an "amicable divorce". In OVERBOARD, after being abandoned by conniving husband Edward Herrmann, amnesiac sufferer Goldie Hawn is convinced by her "husband" Kurt Russell that she is the mother of his sons. Here the so-called "wife" sets up the situation for her own benefit, and her so-called husband goes along because it will enable him to reunite (maybe) with his original lover.

What I find particularly fascinating in HOUSESITTER is that as the movie unfurls, and there are more and more stories that have to be created to give a background to the "marriage" of Gwen and Newton, more and more people on the periphery get drawn in, and even when they have doubts about the stories end up not only affirming they are true, but seemingly embracing them.

The best example is Richard Schull and Laurel Cronin as Ralph and Mary. Both are middle aged derelicts who know Gwen (who helped give them food near the restaurant). When Newton's parents (Donald Moffett and Julie Harris) want to meet Gwen's parents, she brings in Ralph and Mary. This includes cleaning them off, draining them of their alcoholic haze, and giving them clothes. Ralph soon falls into line - he likes having a nice daughter. He also talks about his services in World War II. And since he and Mary are cleaned now, he is showing more consideration to his old fellow drunkard, and she's starts embracing the lies. Later, there is a dinner party at the new house, and Newton's boss is among the guests (he is very impressed at the way Newton designed the house). It turns out the boss was in the theater of war that Ralph was claiming he was in. At first the boss is doubting this, but as the evening goes on he starts embracing the idea that Ralph was not only there, but fighting side-by-side with him against the Japanese!

They are not the only ones. It actually hits every character as the film continues because everyone realizes the lies are more pleasant than the truth. And the last one to learn this is Newton - just watch his moment of "lie" when comparing Gwen and Becky and realizing which of the two is really worth more.

I don't think there is any other comedy where truth took such a beating before or since.

Normally I do not like films that have a leading character who is a con-artist especially if it glorifies what they're doing, but in Goldie Hawn's case, I made an exception. I liked it when I first saw it when it came out and thirty years later, I liked it just as much. It's not a perfect film, but it is a good one and very fun to watch. Obviously it's based on the fact that Hawn and Steve Martin have terrific chemistry, hence their first of several films together.

Martin is a big city businessman, brought up in the country by parents Julie Harris and Donald Moffat, and he builds a home for his hopeful fiance, Dana Delany, but she turns down his proposal so it remains vacant for years. One day at a party, he encounters waitress Goldie Hawn, and finding out about the house, she moved in and claims to be his wife, while out shopping meeting his parents and Delaney. They accept her as part of the family, then Martin arrive and after his initial objection to the scheme decides to use it to try to get Delaney back.

But Hawn is not about to let that happen and her delightful scheming provides a lot of amusing twists, including introducing herself to his boss. I give credit to the script and the direction as well as the actors for making this a charming screwball comedy with Han as delightful as some of the great 30's zany ladies. She's Carole Lombard, Marion Davies and Constance Bennett rolled into one, and this is one of her best performances. Oh, and Martin ain't bad either.