Alan Arkin

Paul Mazursky, Bob Rafelson and Elaine May come to mind -- as does one scene in particular, with Elliott Gould's parents in Jules Feiffer's more cartoonishly stylized "Little Murders," unable to express a single personal thought or feeling unless it's been codified and freeze-dried in quotation marks by some famous author.

The film doesn't say that urban living is too much to bear (as do some '70s films, like Little Murders or Taxi Driver), and it's not a treatise on the necessity of family or social immersion.