Oh, there’s the nostalgic appeal, the history, the assemblage of great comic geniuses blah, blah, blah… and it’s perfect for Masochist Night (a group my friends regularly get together for an evening of fortified wine, American food, and a movie that is not just bad but torture). I can’t say it’s one of my favorite movies… yet, there is something poignant about a clown accidentally catching himself on fire. I’m not exactly a fan of the opera, either, or machines of war, but as those things are, this movie is awe-inspiring.
The Pause That Refreshes
If you haven’t seen it, don’t come here for a plot summary… you can easily find one of those elsewhere, but writing one, as well as reciting the names of the characters, would be like pulling out fingernails with pliers. Instead I’ll use the actors’ names and just get to the interesting stuff. Jimmy Durante is the only character to die in the movie… appropriate, in that most of his career was spent emulating an animated corpse (though I like to think that there was extra footage shot for a version in which each of the main characters die in random, freak accidents). After a car crash in the desert, he tells a small group of motorists that there is “350 G’s” buried in a park in Santa Rosita under a “Big W”—just before he mutters “rosebud” and drops a glass snow globe (just kidding). Naturally, they all think he was merely delirious and they want to avoid involvement and get on with their journeys. But when Norman Fell—the first plainclothes cop who arrives at the scene—grills them with inpatient intensity as to the dead man’s final words, they all quickly come around to the validity of his dying secret. From this moment on, GREED is the engine driving this movie. The Holy Grail being represented by “The Big W”—too ridiculous to ever forget (especially when you hear Jimmy Durante say it: “…the ‘big dubya’ I tell ya!”) (And prescient, as that would become a name both for “the internet” and an American President who stole two elections.)
The Big W
Then comes the most amazing scene in the annals of negotiation. The five men take off in their four vehicles along with three additional women (who at this point seem to embody the voice of reason: “Go to the police!”) At first they spontaneously decide to try to outrun each other, but then stop to talk and work things out… rationally. Anyone who has ever tired to argue with someone who doesn’t see things their way, or has found math to create more problems than it solves, or has seen money corrupt people’s minds, or has experienced negotiations breaking down (I’m talking about everyone alive) could carry this scene around like a Saint Christopher medal for whenever one of these situations come up—like once a week, if not several times a day—not to solve anything, but to offer solace.
Meanwhile, the police are keeping an eye on the group, suspecting that they have information about where the money is hidden. Spencer Tracy is the detective who has been trying to solve the case for 15 years, and he sees this is finally his chance to recover the money—as well as a fascinating sociological experiment. The rest of the police—watching the whole thing play out from their command center—see it as a kind of sporting event and all develop their favorites. There is an entire subplot involving Spencer Tracy trying to get the chief of police, William Demarest (who is funny even in this unfunny role) to negotiate with the mayor to increase his pension (which is not gong to happen because ST is an “honest cop” who “closed down the houses”). I feel like this whole bit, along with ST’s tortured relationship with his wife and daughter, could be cut out—it’s just there to make him more sympathetic and explain has later actions—I’d like it more if he was just portrayed as a kind of likable, eccentric cop who’s been trying to solve this case for 15 years and is a little nuts. He’s still gonna be likable—he’s goddamn Spencer Tracy!
Goddamn Spencer Tracy
A large part of the movie, then, is just interminable, endless car chases and crashes, screeching tires and crunching metal, people screaming, bickering, whining, and more screaming, all accompanied by the endless, mind-numbing score. The scene where Jonathan Winters destroys the entire filling station—when you first see that, you think it’s the most amazing thing ever captured on film, but on subsequent viewings it’s five minutes of absolute torture. The entire movie is frankly a little hard to stomach, watching it at home, and I’m sure much more enjoyable when you commit yourself to a movie theater seat, particularly because it was shown in “Cinerama”—mega widescreen. The reason I’m watching it now, however, and writing about it, is that between all the explosions and shrill insults are some incredibly funny moments—nuanced and subtle looks and glances, reactions, and perfectly timed and delivered lines. These people weren’t comedic legends circa 1963 for nothing. Supposedly Groucho Marx turned down the father-in-law role eventually filled by Ethel Merman as the mother-in-law. And as much as her character is like three hours of amplified fingernails on the chalkboard, it’s hard to imagine the movie without her. It’s like you get the feeling that before this movie, mothers-in-law were sweet, respected, beloved—and here lies the invention of the mother-in-law joke, its apex, its decline, its postmortem. In fact, the movie ends with a mother-in-law slipping on a banana peel combo—which is every bit as terminal as Slim Pickens’ bull riding the H-Bomb in Doctor Strangelove.
Things really start to heat up when the initial characters who witnessed the crash start meeting up with additional characters, who in each case are engaged to assist on the quest, out of necessity. First Milton Berle and his wife, played by Dorothy Provine, and her mother, Ethel Merman, after their car is wrecked, hitch a ride with Terry-Thomas who is at his best as an easily offended Englishman. He and Milton Berle begin to clash, and he later launches into a jaw-dropping anti-American monologue that you’ll want to hear over several times. Sid Caesar and Edie Adams hire the most dilapidated biplane you’ve ever seen and its barely conscious pilot. Jonathan Winters confides in a motorist, Phil Silvers—who looks like he was drawn by Mad Magazine’s Don Martin—who then double-crosses him. Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett hire a drunken pilot, Jim Backus, who is knocked unconscious while mixing Old Fashioneds, leaving the doofuses to fly the plane. And finally, Ethel Merman tries to call her son Sylvester, played by Dick Shawn, who lives in a Santa Rosita beach house where he apparently spends all day drinking beer and dancing with his girlfriend, Barrie Chase, who (and her black bikini), in just a couple of scenes, launched a thousand masturbatory fantasies.
The misadventures grow increasingly tedious. Sid Caesar and Edie Adams are the first to reach Santa Rosita, far ahead of the rest, but while trying to buy digging tools get locked in the basement of a hardware store… for nearly an hour of the movie! She lights hundreds of candles and he crashes around with a forklift and has misadventures with every tool known to man… while cases of TNT wait patiently in the background. By the time the INTERMISSION comes around, they have finally decided to dynamite the door open, but…. the fuse… sputters….
Finally, with the help of a couple of cab drivers played by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Peter Falk, they all arrive at the park, but we, the audience, are first shown the “The Big W”—four palm trees forming a “w”—accompanied by a celestial choir, in case you don’t pick up on it. As they continue to frolic and scheme, then comes the one real poignant scene in the movie—what gives it its heart, if it has a heart, or at least attempts to rescue it from its rampant misogyny. One of the “interchangeable” blondes, the “good girl” played by Dorothy Provine, while taking a step back, and no doubt contemplating fleeing the madness, suddenly sees the “Big W,” and knows. Meanwhile, Spencer Tracy is in on the scene by himself, supposedly not to draw attention to police presence, but of course scheming to wait until the others find the money so he can move in like a buzzard. He notices that Dorothy Provine notices something and makes her acquaintance. Then she confides in him, telling him that if they split the money she could get away from her pathetic husband, her crazy brother, and her overbearing mother, and that she maybe would be able to afford to live in a convent. It’s funny, of course, but it’s also incredibly heartbreaking.
If the comic strategy up until this point was to make you suffer along with the characters, now the movie ratchets up the anxiety to a post-comic level and becomes just plain squirmingly uncomfortable. Spencer Tracy busts them all (without even showing his badge) and gets them to agree to drive over to the police station and turn themselves in. He then takes the money and heads to Mexico. I remember seeing this as a kid and feeling torn… “Don’t do it!” I implored. I cared about him! Then, to make it even worse, on the way to turning themselves in, the entire group realizes that ST isn’t going to the station at all, but heading for the border. And thus ends the movie with an uninspired chase sequence, now all of THEM chasing Spencer Tracy, like a scene from Dawn of the Dead. Eventually ending on a broken fire escape and a wavering fire truck ladder… and it is… really… not… funny…
Zombies On The March
The final scene has them all in a hospital room covered in bandages, actually fairly gruesome and depressing. Buddy Hackett throws a banana peel on the floor. The women come marching in, Ethel Merman nagging full blast, and she slips and falls on the banana peel. All the men break out in spontaneous laughter, and even Spencer Tracy joins them. Not funny, not really uplifting or healing. Not a good ending. By this point, as shrill and annoying as Ethel Merman has been throughout, there is something about her wide-eyed cluelessness that actually made me feel sorry for her, and eventually grow fond of her. Nearly half the movie’s gags are at her expense. I eventually got on her side. Slipping on a banana peel?
At some point in my movie-going life I decided to never criticize the end of a movie without offering my own version, because, really, endings are tough. So… here’s my suggestion. I like how the money blows out of the suitcase into the crowd below, kind of like redistributed wealth. But after that, here’s the changes: The police arrive, and now Spencer Tracy is a fugitive with the rest of them, instead of being chased by them, and he figures out some ingenious way to escape the scene. They all head for the docks and they charter a boat, skippered by Alan Hale, with Bob Denver as the first mate. Except… Dick Shawn stays behind because they’re near his beach house, and by this time, Ethel Merman and Spencer Tracy have been flirting, and they hit it off and stay behind, too. The final scene, then, we see Dick Shawn and Barrie Chase in the beach house dancing, now joined by Ethel Merman and Spencer Tracy, also dancing—to Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time.”
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