100 min
5.2
1974
US
Harry Evers and Marvin Ellison have been playing poker Thursday nights with their friends for years. When a disagreement breaks up the game, they decide to continue meeting and doing different things together, instead of staying home with their wives. When the wives find out that the games stopped some time ago, they are a quite upset. Just what have they been doing on Thursday nights.
Overview
Reviews
Peter McGinn wrote:Thursday’s Game is a lightweight comedy in some ways, but it is quirky enough to rise above the level of more forgettable network movies. It features Gene Wilder and a competent ensemble cast made up of faces that would later become very familiar in popular tv sitcoms. We watched it recently as part of a Cloris Leachman retrospective.
The humor ranges from being fairly subtle to occasional slapstick. The plot focuses mostly on Wilder’s character, his employment and marriage ups and downs, with lesser attention paid to Bob Newhart’s restless character, who wants out of his marriage.
As mentioned above, it is lightweight stuff, but entertaining enough to be worth our time, with a rather sudden and whimsical ending that in a way seemed to suit the story.
