Tag Archives: Harold Lloyd

The recent demise of writer/director/comic actor Harold Ramis at age 69 was a shock to most people, though I suspect that baby boomers like myself were particularly shaken and reminded of their own mortality. Yet one more of the seemingly immortal Young Turks of counterculture comedy has left us prematurely, joining the ranks of John Belushi, Gilda Radner, John Candy, Michael O’Donoghue, Phil Hartman, and The Firesign Theatre’s Peter Bergman. There have, of course, been numerous accolades for Ramis and his achievements, not just for the movies he appeared in or either wrote or directed or both, but also his work with Second City, The National Lampoon Radio Hour, and Second City’s television spin-off SCTV. (Ramis was SCTV’s first head writer in addition to being a cast member in its first two seasons. Although SCTV never enjoyed the ratings or financial success of its chief rival and inspiration Saturday Night Live, it was the funnier series and the material has dated far less.) The posthumous praise was predictably followed by the inevitable detractors pointing out that not everything Ramis touched turned to gold, especially in the last decade of his filmmaking career. (Admittedly, the least said about mutts like Year One and the bewilderingly pointless remake of Bedazzled, the better. But then even comedy giants like Laurel & Hardy and the Marx Brothers took their last bows in unworthy failures like Atoll K and Love Happy.)

As fate would have it, I recently revisited Ramis’ directorial debut Caddyshack (1980), which he also co-wrote with Douglas Kenney (co-founder of and former editor/writer for National Lampoon) and Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill Murray’s big brother). I had particularly fond memories of Caddyshack from days passed and was pleasantly surprised to learn that, unlike so many similar “slobs vs. snobs” comedies of the period, it’s stood the test of time pretty well. Other than how amusing it still remains, the other surprising aspect about seeing Caddyshack nowadays is the sense of melancholy the film has acquired over the years that certainly wasn’t present when it first premiered in July 1980. That melancholy can be attributed to a pair of missed opportunities that weren’t apparent at the time.

To explain the first of those “missed opportunities,” a little historical context is in order. In its brief century or so of existence, American movies have had only two Renaissances of comedy. The first one was in the silent days when top clowns like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon reigned supreme. The second and even more impressive comedy Renaissance occurred in the talkies’ first decade when audiences were presented with a cinematic smorgasbord of great comedians that included W.C. Fields, Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Joe E. Brown, Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor, Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and the Three Stooges, as well as some “legitimate” actors with wicked comedy chops, such as James Cagney, Carole Lombard, William Powell, Glenda Farrell, Lee Tracy, Warren William, and Cary Grant.

With the phenomenal success in the mid- to late-1970s of Saturday Night Live and, to a lesser extent, SCTV, it seemed as though we were in for a third film comedy Renaissance as soon as the aforementioned Young Turks of counterculture humor in those shows’ casts made the jump from the small screen to the silver one. Alas, of all the films that resulted when those comic artists made that transition, only two of them, Animal House and Caddyshack, fulfilled that promise. (Not coincidentally, both films had National Lampoon magazine alumni working on them.) But rather than being the tip of an iceberg, these two movies were instead the crest of a wave that crashed ignobly with overblown, unfunny behemoths like 1941 and The Blues Brothers. And the subsequent film comedies starring these young comics just got progressively worse. Only Frank Oz’s 1986 film version of the off-Broadway musical comedy adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors and Ramis’ 1993 comedy-fantasy Groundhog Day (generally regarded as Ramis’ masterpiece) managed to be exceptions. (The fact that both of these films featured Bill Murray, the only SNL cast member to become a major movie star, was also no coincidence.) Hence, the first of the two “missed opportunities.” (More on the second one later.)

With that intro out of the way, here are 10 reasons that Caddyshack may just be the best summertime comedy ever.

1. The setting

Legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder once said, “I think the funniest picture the Marx Brothers ever made was A Night at the Opera because opera is such a deadly serious background.” Similarly, Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray realized that country clubs were equally intimidating bastions of elitism, bigotry, and conformity. Kenney, in particular, hoped that Caddyshack would be an even sharper dissection of the divide between the Haves and the Have Nots in America than the script for Animal House that he and Ramis co-wrote. In fact, the script had many autobiographical references to incidents experienced by Ramis and the Murray brothers, all of whom caddied at local country clubs as teenagers. In 1988, Bill Murray told the New York Times Magazine, “The kids who were members of the club were despicable; you couldn’t believe the attitude they had. I mean, you were literally walking barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans, carrying some privileged person’s sports toys on your back for five miles.”

Anyone who’s ever been a golf aficionado or had a friend or relative devoted to golfing knows that the sport demands an even greater level of allegiance and dedication than the most fanatical of religions. In this respect, the fictional Bushwood Country Club was an ideal setting for a satirical slapstick comedy. Although the vast majority of the principal shooting was done on location in Florida, the story is definitely set in the mid-West (Illinois, the Murrays’ home state, to be specific). In fact, Ramis deliberately selected the Rolling Hills Golf Club in Davie, Florida, for the golfing sequences because it didn’t have any palm trees.

2. The script

Or, rather, what was left of the script by the time filming commenced. Ramis, Kenney and Doyle-Murray originally conceived Caddyshack as a coming-of-age comedy/drama revolving around the teenage caddies at Bushwood, particularly Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe), a boy fresh out of high school who experiences the most significant summer of his young life as he deals with romantic entanglements, rivalries with his fellow caddies, and the social barriers he needs to overcome in order to win the club’s annual caddy scholarship to finance the college education his large, cash-strapped Catholic family can’t afford. That’s what Caddyshack was supposed to be about, but—oh, yeah, the script also had a few zany country club regulars that the caddies would encounter, you know, just tiny bit parts, practically cameo appearances—and this is where the original script ended up being thrown to the four winds. As it turned out, three of the four performers hired to play those wacky regulars—Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Rodney Dangerfield—were comedians who were used to ignoring scripts and working off-the-cuff. Of course, Ramis could’ve asserted his authority and demanded that the three of them quit improvising their lines and stick to the script—which brings us to the next reason.

3. The director

To this day, it remains unclear exactly why executive producer Jon Peters entrusted the helming of Caddyshack to Harold Ramis, who’d never directed a movie before, but the choice turned out to be an inspired one. Ramis may’ve lacked experience as a filmmaker, but, fortunately, he had a wealth of knowledge about improvisational comedy, thanks to his time with Chicago’s Second City, which made him the ideal candidate for directing—or, perhaps, more accurately, not interfering with—his top bananas as they improvised their way through scenes. As Ramis explained in “The 19th Hole,” a 1999 documentary about the making of Caddyshack compiled for the DVD release, “We always trusted improvisation. We never felt we were just ad-libbing it or winging it. It’s an actual technique and a method that allows you to create material instantly and it’s not just, you know, grabbed out of thin air. You actually plan what you’re going to do and you have a—it’s like having a script without finished dialogue.”

It’s also worth noting that there are several scenes where the younger cast members can be seen cracking up on camera at the antics of their elders. Thanks to his background, Ramis realized that, in comedy, spontaneity is far more important than neatness, and let the cameras continue to roll, whereas a more experienced hack would’ve yelled “cut” and kept reshooting until the actors “got it right,” even though the freshness of the moment would’ve be completely lost. (Hey, even as seasoned a professional as Cary Grant can be seen cracking up on camera in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday as comedian Billy Gilbert improvised his way through a scene.)

4. The filming

Another blessing in disguise was that Ramis’ inexperience as a filmmaker extended to his technical knowledge of the medium as well. By his own admission, his visual approach was mainly to just set up the cameras and record whatever happened in front of them, rather than storyboarding the shots. (Indeed, many of the scenes involving multiple characters were shot with the actors standing like a chorus line.) Whether by design or accident, this approach was similar to the way film comedies were made during those two aforementioned comedy Renaissances. Back then, most film comedies had a deliberately “flat” look to them. Every inch of the sets would be lit and most of the camera set-ups were mid- or far-shots, so the comedians could ad-lib to their heart’s content and wander around the sets freely without resorting to moving the camera or cutting to different angles.

5. The cast

Caddyshack was a true ensemble piece and not a star vehicle, in that none of the roles dominated the entire proceedings, and the leads were all given equal opportunities to shine.

a. The top bananas

Chevy Chase: Chase, who received top billing, was the film’s biggest name at the time, as difficult as that may be to grasp today. His laid-back turn as dissipated lumber yard heir Ty Webb was the closest he’d ever come to living up to his early promotion as “the new Cary Grant.” Yes, Virginia, believe it or not, Chase was actually that highly thought of at the time. Ironically, it was his crack about Grant being “a homo” on national television that first revealed to the general public what a nasty, mean-spirited bastard he could be. (Scott Colomby, who played caddy Tony D’Annunzio, mentioned in a 2007 interview: “Everyone on the set of Caddyshack was just as cool as humanly possible, except for Chevy Chase. He was a prick.”) Still, Chase was at the top of his game in Caddyshack and his casual throwaway delivery of lines like, “Your uncle molests collies,” was right on the money.

Rodney Dangerfield: More than any of the other principals, Dangerfield was the movie’s biggest wildcard. Outside of a supporting role in The Projectionist, a small, low-budget, minimally distributed 1971 independent film (which was an unauthorized remake of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., no less), Dangerfield had never appeared in a movie before. The writers originally envisioned Don Rickles in the role of Falstaffian nouveau riche construction magnate Al Czervik, but Dangerfield was gaining popularity with young audiences at the time with his guest appearances on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live (where, in a parody of The Amazing Colossal Man, he did a series of “he’s so big” jokes with machine-gun rapidity), so Peters decided to go with him. Despite his unfamiliarity with film techniques (he was initially spooked by the inability of the cast and crew to laugh while the cameras were rolling), Dangerfield, a graduate of the Borsht Belt school of stand-up comedy, ended up being the film’s biggest asset, completely walking away with the show (much to the dismay of some of the other cast members). Many of his one-liners have become oft-quoted over the years, such as his remark to his Chinese golfing guest as they first enter Bushwood, “I think this place is restricted, Wang, so don’t tell ‘em you’re Jewish.” It would also seem that, of all the other older members of the cast, Dangerfield bonded the most with the younger actors, mainly because of their mutual appreciation for recreational drugs. In that same 2007 interview, Colomby revealed that the laundry room of the motel where the cast and crew were booked became the designated partying area, and that occasionally after hours Dangerfield would ask him, “Hey, Scott, you wanna do some laundry?”

Bill Murray: While many of Chase’s and Dangerfield’s lines were impromptu, by all accounts, Murray’s dialogue was entirely improvised during his six days on the set. Much more than Chase, Murray represented the outlaw nature of counterculture comedy, and Murray’s mastery of “stream of consciousness” humor was better than any other comic in the business, even Robin Williams’. The audience never learns the back-story of Murray’s character, greenskeeper Carl Speckler, so it’s not clear if he’s just a slow-thinking stoner with delusions of grandeur or a brain-damaged Vietnam vet (the war was still fresh in peoples’ minds then and was still considered fair game for satirical comedy), but it’s irrelevant. His role is central in setting up the running gag that serves as the framework for many of the comic set-pieces, Carl’s obsessive determination to kill the gopher that’s infested the golf course, and Murray’s fevered monologues about outsmarting his “enemy” provided the movie with some of its funniest moments. Another off-the-cuff moment, Murray’s celebrated “Cinderella boy” speech, was a perfect example of his skill at improvisation. (As writer Tad Friend explained in a 2004 New Yorker article about Ramis: “Ramis took Murray aside and said, ‘When you’re playing sports, do you ever just talk to yourself like you’re the announcer?’ Murray said, ‘Say no more,’ and did his monologue in one take.”) The scene is all the more impressive seeing as the only description of it in the script was: “The sky is beginning to darken. Carl, the greenskeeper is absently lopping the heads off bedded tulips as he practices his golf swing with a grass whip.” (At Murray’s request, mums were substituted for tulips.)

Ted Knight: While rewatching Caddyshack, it became apparent that the performance that gains the most with each subsequent viewing is that of Ted Knight as the movie’s bad guy: pompous, reactionary WASP Judge Smails. Although Knight was no stranger to playing heavies on shows like The Twilight Zone and Peter Gunn early in his television career, the Judge was his first out-and-out comedic villain. And, as such, he succeeded brilliantly in becoming the movies’ best stuffed-shirt comic foil since Sig Ruman sputtered in apoplectic rage at the insults of Groucho Marx. In essence, Dangerfield played Groucho to Knight’s Ruman, a conflict that practically mirrored their off-camera relationship as well. Knight was an actor of the old school who would learn his lines to the letter with the intention of delivering them exactly as written, and he was completely thrown by Dangerfield’s constant ad-libbing. Cindy Morgan, who played Lacey Underall, the Judge’s promiscuous niece, once commented on Facebook, “[Knight] wasn’t playing angry, he was being angry.” Whether real or not, Knight’s exasperated frustration provided the film with a formidable enough antagonist for the other clowns to bounce off of.

b. The kids and the second bananas: It was the younger members of the cast who inadvertently provided some of the film’s current sense of melancholia resulting from the second case of “missed opportunities.” In the initial stages of scripting and filming Caddyshack, O’Keeefe, Sarah Holcomb (as Danny’s Irish girlfriend, club waitress Maggie O’Hooligan), and Colomby were intended to be the movie’s stars, but the more the roles of Ty, Al, Carl, and the Judge were enlarged, the less prominent the roles of Danny, Maggie, and Tony became. What was supposed to have been their breakthrough roles instead reduced them to the traditional ingénue parts that were regularly found in the movies of the Marx Brothers. (O’Keefe went on to extensive work on television and the stage, whereas Holcomb, who had also played Clorette DePasto in Animal House, became ensnared in Hollywood’s drug culture and soon retired from movies.) In all fairness, the romantic scenes between O’Keefe and Holcomb had a genuine sweetness and emotional sensitivity that kept them from becoming the type of insufferable interruptions that the equivalent “young lovers” scenes in the Marxes’ movies were. In addition, Cindy Morgan’s underrated turn as Lacey showed the professionalism of an accomplished comedienne and is another performance that gains with subsequent viewings. The same goes for Colomby’s Tony, which reflects a smooth, understated assurance as well.

Then there’s the film’s “second bananas” who provided much needed support to the main clowns. One of the most prominent of these supporting roles was Dan Resin as Dr. Beeper, Bushwood’s record-holding golf champion and the Judge’s partner-in-snobbery. (Resin’s best moment in the film comes when, after a swim at the marina, Beeper tries to prove how hip he is by bumming a drag off the joint the rich kids are sharing and almost electrocutes himself by instinctively grabbing his pager when it goes off.) Another invaluable supporting player was screenwriter Doyle-Murray as Lou Loomis, Bushwood’s caddy master and inveterate gambler forever in hock to his bookie. (His best moment occurs when the Judge wins the “odds or evens” contest to determine who tees off first in the climatic golf game and Lou quips with a barely-concealed smirk: “Your honor, your Honor.”)

Also deserving of mention are Hollywood veteran Henry Wilcoxon (best remembered as Marc Anthony in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 version of Cleopatra) as the Lutheran Bishop who comes close to being electrocuted himself during “the best game of my life” (played in the midst of a raging thunderstorm) when he vents his anger at “the Good Lord” by furiously shaking his club at the heavens after missing his final putt; Ramis’ former Second City colleague Ann Ryerson as Grace, the gangly tomboy caddy whose Baby Ruth bar winds up in the club’s swimming pool in the movie’s most notorious scene (which, not surprisingly, was deleted for the “edited-for-television” version that predominated on non-cable TV); Jackie Davis as Smoke, Bushwood’s token “Negro” (who gets even with the Judge for his racist joke about “the Jew, the Catholic, and the colored boy” by buffing his golf shoes so hard that sparks fly); Lois Kibbee as the perpetually flustered Mrs. Smails (who lasciviously admires Danny’s young body when he turns up undressed in her bathroom while on the lam from the Judge after getting caught making out with Lacey); John F. Barmon Jr. as the Judge’s slovenly grandson Spaulding (who inspires Al’s crack, “Now I know why tigers eat their young, you know?”); Elaine Aiken and veteran character actor Albert Salmi as Danny’s parents; Peter Berkrot and Minerva Scelza as Tony’s siblings and fellow caddies Angie and Joey (the unspoken implication is that the D’Annunzios are just as large a Catholic family as the Noonans are), and Brian MacConnachie (another National Lampoon alumni) and Scott Powell as Drew and Gatsby, the club hanger-ons who pal around with Al and inadvertently set the Czervik-Smails conflict in motion by inviting their buddy to join them at the club for a golf date.

6. The producer

Doug Kenney is credited as the film’s producer, but by most accounts, he was so caught up in his drug and alcohol habits that his main duties while filming were basically coordinating the extracurricular activities (i.e., partying) that took place after the day’s shooting. (Sadly, Kenney never lived to see the finished film. He was killed in a freak accident while on vacation in Hawaii after the principal photography was completed.) The movie’s real hands-on producer was former hairdresser Jon Peters, who’d just parlayed his professional relationship with Barbra Streisand into becoming a major Hollywood player. Caddyshack was only the fifth movie he’d produced. In addition to taking a chance on Ramis and Dangerfield, Peters also came up with one major inspiration: making the gopher Carl’s determined to off a major on-screen character. As originally scripted and filmed, the only time the audience would see the gopher was in the form of a hand puppet that poked its head out of a hole, prompting Al’s lament, “Hey, that kangaroo stole my ball!” Whether or not it was motivated by Caddyshack being an Orion Pictures production that was going to be distributed by Warner Bros., Peters realized late in the game that the “Carl vs. the gopher” subplot should be patterned along the lines of such similar eternal battles as “Elmer Fudd vs. Bugs Bunny” and “Wile E. Cayote vs. the Road Runner” in Warners’ classic Looney Tunes cartoons. After receiving instructions from Peters to incorporate the gopher into the main action, Ramis initially thought that a live animal could be trained to pull it off, but when that turned out to be unfeasible, John Dykstra, who’d already been commissioned to provide the post-production special effects, was assigned to create an animatronic gopher and the underground network of tunnels it inhabited.

Peters was also single-handedly responsible for the one element of the film that dates it more than any other aspect: the gratuitous nudity. When Morgan expressed discomfort about doing a skinny-dipping sequence with Chase, Ramis had no problem with acquiescing to her objections, but Peters basically told her to do the scene nude or else. (“Or else” being, of course, the traditional Hollywood threat “you’ll never work in this town again.”) Morgan did manage to stand her ground, however, in refusing to allow a Playboy photographer to cover the skinny-dipping shoot. But there were reasons that films of the 1970s and early 80s (especially comedies) contained brief flashes of nudity other than to titillate the adolescent and teenage boys in the audience; more importantly, it was to avoid the dreaded “G” rating, which was the kiss of death at the box office to any movies not intended exclusively for young children. (George Lucas deliberately inserted a brief shot of a severed arm in Star Wars for the exact same purpose.) With its limited profanity and occasional “gross-out” jokes, Caddyshack was never in danger of being rated “G,” but an “R” was considered so much hipper for a film aimed at teenagers than a “PG.” Of course, this was before the 2000 “scandal” in which a Federal Trade Commission investigation revealed that “R” ratings were a joke and that gory horror pictures, violent action movies, and raunchy comedies were intentionally being marketed to adolescent boys by the Hollywood studios, a “revelation” that had political hacks like Senators McCain, Lieberman, Hatch, and Brownback professing to be shocked, shocked! (One has to wonder what planet they’d been living on.)

7. The music

Singer/songwriter Kenny Loggins had previously composed the song “I Believe in Love” for Streisand and Peters’ remake of A Star is Born, when he was commissioned by Peters to write the original songs for Caddyshack. The songs, “I’m Alright” (the main theme that runs under both the opening and closing credits), “Lead the Way,” and “Mr. Night,” were all fairly catchy with some nice use of choral arrangements in the backgrounds. (A fourth song, “Make the Move,” wasn’t used in the finished film, but was included on the soundtrack album.) “I’m Alright” was a minor hit that generated a lot of airplay, but the best of the bunch is “Mr. Night,” a honky-tonk ode to teenage horniness that accompanies the scene where, to commemorate the annual caddies’ tournament, the caddies are allowed their only admittance into the country club pool for the summer. (A crudely written sign outside the pool states that the caddies are welcome from “1:00 to 1:15.”) “Mr. Night” plays during the first half of the scene to be followed by a brief excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” for a water ballet spoof, and then, when the aforementioned Baby Ruth bar ends up in the pool, Johnny Mandel’s background score parodies John Williams’ iconic “shark music” from Jaws. (Mandel also quoted from Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” for the film’s climax.)

Mandel was a veteran jazz composer and arranger whose previous film work included his Grammy-winning jazz score for I Want to Live and another major comedy blockbuster M*A*S*H, for which he also composed the theme song “Suicide is Painless.” Mandel’s background score for Caddyshack evokes a deliberately retro vibe reminiscent of the light jazz-influenced orchestral scores that accompanied comedies and comic-thrillers of the 1960s. Interestingly, the one pure jazz piece in Mandel’s score was heard in the background during the Judge’s ritzy gathering at the marina. (It’s a safe bet that the irony of jazz—born in the cotton fields and whore houses of the deep South—being depicted in the movie as “rich people’s music” wasn’t lost on Mandel for a second.)

8. The ethnic humor

Thanks to the paper-thin sensitivities of adherents to Political Correctness, the ethnic humor in Caddyshack is now considered highly controversial, which wasn’t the case when the film first opened. Not surprisingly, about 95% of the ethnic jokes came from Dangerfield, who belonged an older generation of comedians for whom nothing was sacred, least of all ethnic and racial sensitivities. (The other 5% would be Carl’s cracks about the Scottish heritage of his boss Sandy, such as “I’ll fill your bagpipes with Wheatina.”) And the bulk of Al’s ethnic one-liners were generally aimed at the D’Annunzios.

Al: “Hey, you guys are brothers, huh?”

Tony: “Yeah.”

Al: “So what is this, a family business or what? You know, they say, for Italians, this is skilled labor, you know?”

Tony: (sarcastically) “No, actually, I’m a rich millionaire. You see, my doctor told me to go out and carry golf bags a couple of times a week.”

Al: “Hey, you’re a funny kid, you know? What time’re you due back at Boys Town?”

Not to get all highbrow or pretentious about it, but Al’s ethnic jokes play into the movie’s larger theme about outsiders trying to fit in—or not giving a damn about whether they fit in or not, as the case may be. (The Judge explicitly states this theme when he says, “Some people simply do not belong.”) As Al’s line about Bushwood being restricted makes clear, he’s well aware that folks like him stick out like a sore thumb there. His razzing of the D’Annunzios is a kind of expression of solidarity acknowledging that his presence at Bushwood is just as incongruous as theirs’ is.

9. The drug humor

Outside of the nudity, the other element of Caddyshack that most clearly stamps it as a product of the early 80s is the drug jokes. Indeed, drug humor was so prevalent between the mid-60s and the mid-80s that two comedy LPs of the early 70s, National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner and Robert Klein’s Mind over Matter, had references to “obligatory drug jokes.” As with the ethnic jokes, the drug jokes in Caddyshack serve a larger purpose towards the movies’ main theme. Smoking dope, as it turns out, is just about the only activity that both the rich kids and the poor ones at Bushwood have in common. Lou warns the caddies that he’s had complaints about them “smoking grass.” And, during the marina scene, we see Spaulding and his stoner pals passing around a doobie. (This, by the way, is the same joint that Dr. Beeper tries to cop a toke from before getting the shock of his life.)

Drug jokes also play a big part in the film’s only scene between Chase and Murray in which Ty “plays through” Carl’s squalid quarters while prepping for the big golf match the next morning. (A scene that Peters insisted on at the last minute after he realized that his two top-billed actors didn’t have any screen time together. So Ramis, Chase, and Murray hastily brainstormed some material over lunch and shot the entire scene that afternoon.) As Ty tries to find a way to hit his ball off of Carl’s leftover pizza slices back onto the green, Carl shows off his new grass hybrid, “a cross of bluegrass… uh… Kentucky bluegrass, featherbed bent, and Northern California sensemilia. The amazing stuff about this is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home, and just get stoned to the bejeezus-belt that night on this stuff.” The scene’s funniest moment occurs when Ty starts coughing and gagging after reluctantly taking a drag off a monster blunt packed with Carl’s grass and Carl casually admits, “It’s a little harsh.”

10. The grand finale

The movie’s climax is a $20,000 per player team match (an amount that, eventually, swells to $80,000) pitting Ty and Al against the Judge and Dr. Beeper. Like the finales of so many slapstick comedies, it was mainly an excuse to tie up all the various loose ends and allow the good guys to triumph over the bad guys. Outside of a few isolated gags (Ty’s ball flies into the trees and is impaled on a crow’s beak), the match itself is not played for laughs. The real comedy in the movie’s conclusion is reserved for Carl’s preparations to go Defcon 1 on the gopher with plastic explosives molded into the shape of woodland animals like “the harmless squirrel and the friendly rabbit.” Instead, Ramis and his co-writers borrowed a page from the book of director Frank Capra and his most frequent collaborator, screenwriter Robert Riskin, and played the golf match for populist sentimentality. As the match gets underway, word spreads like wildfire throughout the club and, eventually, the entire support staff of Bushwood pours out onto the links in the hopes of finally seeing the Judge receive his well-deserved comeuppance. And when, at a crucial moment in the match, it seems as though that comeuppance won’t be forthcoming after all, the movie’s Dues Ex Machina arrives in the form of Carl’s detonating the homemade bombs he’s placed in the gopher’s tunnels. Which, since it was the Judge who ordered the extermination of the gopher in the first place, it would seem that, in the immortal words of William Shakespeare, he was “hoist with his own petard.”

Speaking of Master Will, with its wonderful variety of characters, situations, and intersecting romantic pairings, I’m seriously tempted to describe Caddyshack as Shakespearian, but out of deference to those people who’d interpret seeing the words Caddyshack and “Shakespearian” in the same sentence as irrefutable proof of the End of Civilization As We Know It, I’ll resist the temptation. Still, as Bushwood’s Hoi Polloi party triumphantly, let us recall the Bard’s memorable phrase, “If music be the food of love, play on.” Or as Al puts it, “Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!”

Reviews

Special Report: Criterion’s Reconstruction of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World”

January 24, 2014 Stuart Galbraith IV 4 Comments

One of the most eagerly-awaited titles of this or any other year, Criterion’s new Blu-ray of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World offers a long-desired reconstruction of the film’s original roadshow version, a cut of the film not seen by anyone a few months after the movie’s November 7, 1963 premiere.

An epic, all-star comedy directed by Stanley Kramer, it’s as divisive as Hillary Clinton: people tend to either love or hate it. Indeed, some of the more extreme haters harbor an inexplicable resentment toward those who don’t share their opinion. I’m squarely in the other camp. I’ve adored and have been endlessly mesmerized by Kramer’s film since childhood. For me it never gets old, but I can also understand why it might not click with everyone who sees it. It helps to be familiar with the dizzying array of stars, supporting actor-comedians, and even bit players who populate it. It also plays better viewed cold, without any awareness of what’s to come, with no promises or expectations of a “comedy to end all comedies.”

It is, unquestionably, misunderstood by many. Though dominated by broad, large-scale slapstick, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World works as much for other reasons. The movie has an unusual structure, introducing a group of characters which it then breaks up into, eventually, six major groupings, cleverly intercutting their various adventures before they all meet up again at the climax, with additional characters picked up and encountered along the way. This cutting among the various sub-plots as they converge on a potential $350,000 jackpot several hundred miles away is a big part of the film’s charm. Structurally, a comparison to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is not inapt. That silent epic doesn’t make much of an impact when its multiple stories are viewed separately (as they frequently were), but intercut as Griffith intended that picture, like IAMMMMW, it becomes an entirely different viewing experience.

Some reviewers have also mistaken the film as some sort of tribute to silent comedy. Certainly its Harold Lloyd-like climax has elements of that, but overall the film is its own animal. It’s not an attempt at an old-fashioned tribute the way The Great Race (1965) later was. Despite Kramer’s reputation for socially conscious drama and despite IAMMMMW’s greed-driven plot there’s no attempt at any social significance or a “message” of any kind. Despite the presence of comedians and comic actors drawn from silent films, Vaudeville, burlesque, nightclubs, radio, television, and other venues, William and Tania Rose’s screenplay brings these widely-varied performing styles into a solidly-plotted cohesive whole, though it does draw inspiration from various sources and gives each performer breathing room to ply their craft. (For me, parts of the film play like a more cynical Preston Sturges script, particularly in scenes featuring actor William Demarest, in all but name reprising his Officer Kockenlocker character from The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.)

Mainly, this review will explore the 197-minute reconstruction – not “restoration” – of the original 202-minute roadshow version, what was put back and in what form, and how these added elements play against the more familiar and subsequent 163-minute roadshow/general release version.

If you’re reading this review you already probably know It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World backwards. If somehow you’ve made your way through life without ever seeing it, like audio co-commentator Mark Evanier I recommend that you first watch the shorter version of the film, then the longer cut some time later, and then come back to read this review.

To summarize: Trying to elude detectives hot on his trail, career crook “Smiler” Grogan (Jimmy Durante) spectacularly crashes his car in the Mohave Desert many miles north of Los Angeles. Before expiring he tells the five motorists who’ve stopped to help – dentist Melville Crump (Sid Caesar); Vegas-bound pals “Ding” Bell (Buddy Hackett) and Benjy Benjamin (Mickey Rooney); milquetoast seaweed entrepreneur J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle); and simple-minded furniture mover Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters) about $350,000 buried several hundred miles away at Santa Rosita Beach State Park, under what he describes as “ a big ‘W.’” (In a nice touch, Durante repeats this important clue for the audience’s benefit, looking straight into the camera, ensuring that they will be on the lookout, too.)

Joined by Russell’s straight-laced wife, Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and domineering mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman), and Melville’s wife, Monica (Edie Adams), the group quickly abandons any thought of calmly driving down to Santa Rosita together as a group and dividing the stolen money equally. As Benjy says, “it’s every man, including the old bag (Merman), for himself.”

Meanwhile, Chief of Detectives Capt. T.G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy, top-billed) of the Santa Rosita Police Department closely monitors their actions. An honest cop four months away from retirement, Culpepper is equally anxious to close this 15-year-old case, believing that he can finagle its successful resolution into an upgraded pension so that he can “retire with honor.”

As the treasure hunters leave an awesome trail of destruction in their wake – “withholding information, causing accidents, failing to report accidents, reckless driving, theft, at least three cases of assault and battery…” – they pick up other strangers along the way, notably British army Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas), unscrupulous con-man Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), and Russell’s spaced-out brother-in-law, Sylvester Marcus (Dick Shawn)

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World was filmed in Ultra Panavision 70, an anamorphic 65mm process, and originally exhibited as a road show, meaning that instead of saturation bookings on hundreds or thousands of movie screens simultaneously, the film rolled out across the country (and around the world) slowly, methodically. It typically opened in just one big downtown movie palace in each of the country’s biggest cities, playing on a reserved-seats basis for an average run of one year, then after that went into general release and neighborhood theaters and, eventually, drive-ins.

The movie premiered at the Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood on November 3, 1963, and by mid-December had also opened in New York, Chicago, Boston, London, and Atlanta but few, if any, other theaters, partly because most Cinerama houses were still playing How the West Was Won to packed houses, and partly because theaters had to then be converted from the original three-strip Cinerama process to the more standard 70mm equipment needed to run IAMMMMW. By mid-December 1963 distributor United Artists, working with Kramer, decided to cut about 43 minutes of movie out of the long film which, taking into consideration its overture, intermission break, entr’acte, and exit music clocked in at nearly three-and-a-half hours.

And so it was the shorter, 163-minute version that played everywhere else, as a roadshow throughout 1964, in general release, during its 1970 rerelease, on network television, in syndication, and on home video. In 1991 MGM cobbled together its own 175-minute reconstruction, but that release was far from perfect: some of the footage was incorrectly integrated, and least one shot included in that release was apparently never part of any official version.

Criterion’s reconstructed Blu-ray version, supervised by Robert A. Harris, consists mostly of MGM’s HD transfer of the short version integrated with the same deleted footage included on the 1991 home video version, footage derived from 70mm theatrical print trims of the long version. For the 1991 laserdisc and VHS release, this footage retained the optical squeeze added to the extreme left and right sides of the frame so that, when projected onto Cinerama’s deeply-curved screen, the image would stretch back out to more or less normal. This has been optically corrected and properly integrated with the rest of the film. In the 22 years in-between these two home video releases, the color on the trims had faded so badly that the decision was made to layer the color from the 1991 transfer on top of the remastered-for-HD trims. Because the older transfer cropped the Ultra Panavision framing slightly, the area around the edges of the frame look almost monochrome. It’s noticeable, but not nearly as distracting as frame grabs of these scenes suggest. Because of where the magnetic soundtrack matching the action was placed on 70mm release prints, the audio drops out a second at the end of each cut. Harris has included these bits, using English subtitles so that viewers don’t miss any of the dialogue.

So, the vast majority of reinstated material consists of these trims, the same material integrated for that 1991 release. There is a bit of new material, though probably not as much as many were hoping for, and some of that has audio but no picture. The previously unreleased material with both picture and sound is easy to spot, as it’s the footage without the monochrome borders at the edges of the frame. There’s not a lot of this, but what’s there is worthwhile, most notably footage that expands the build-up to the intermission break, particularly at the Santa Rosita police station. The short version edits the build-up to the intermission extremely well, but the build-up in the long version is just as good, just a little different.

There are three short scenes in which there is sound but no picture: Sylvester’s theft of his girlfriend’s car, some more footage of the Crumps locked in the basement of a hardware store, and Culpepper’s telephone conversation with Jimmy the Crook (Buster Keaton, who in the short version has but one line and is onscreen for less than ten seconds).

Each of these three scenes offers a few surprises previously unknown to most Mad World fans: that Sylvester’s girlfriend is actually a married woman, for instance, and that it’s her car he steals. The telephone scene in one respect is almost heartbreaking: the audience hears Keaton’s voice but is denied the chance to actually see him and his reactions to Culpepper’s plotting.

But the sequence also completely changes one aspect of the film. In the short version it appears that Culpepper has suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. (“You know what I believe I’d like?” he asks his fellow cops. “A chocolate fudge sundae, with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”) In the short version, Culpepper’s decision to steal Smiler’s 350 Gs for himself isn’t made clear until very late in the film and comes as a genuine surprise, though there are clues earlier in the picture pointing to that.

In the reconstructed version all surprise is gone as made clear by that phone call to Keaton’s character. Further, Culpepper’s desire to have that chocolate fudge sundae is no longer the pathetic non sequitur of a broken man, but a ruse so that he can get out of the station and call Jimmy from a nearby drugstore. Nice as it would be to see and hear Keaton, the movie is better without that scene.

The brief audio-only footage of the Crumps in the basement is seriously damaged by one truly terrible decision. Unlike the other two audio-only scenes, which use publicity stills (possibly unreleased stills from contact sheets), this footage incorporates behind-the-scenes and set stills. In addition to Sid Caesar and Edie Adams, these stills make visible members of the film crew, including director Stanley Kramer himself, along with a massive Ultra Panavision camera in one shot. This has the effect of completely taking the viewer out of the movie. They’re interesting as photographs but they have no business in a reconstruction like this.

Likely no appropriate stills of the missing scene exist, but that was also true of some of the scenes missing from the 1954 A Star Is Born. In that Gold Standard of movie reconstruction, producer Ron Haver cleverly found ways around the problem, making those missing scenes play as seamlessly as possible. Clearly any evidence of the crew should have been cropped or matted out.

Overall, the long version has its advantages and disadvantages. Except for one early scene showing the mad motorists driving recklessly through a small desert community, with a few exceptions the cut footage mostly extends scenes from the short version and is no great loss without them. While some would argue the reinstated scenes merely make the long film even longer, in some ways it actually improves the pacing. In its short form the movie at times is a little schizophrenic and cuts too abruptly among the various subplots. The build-up in the longer version is more carefully and deliberately paced, in some respects making the payoffs that come later more satisfying. Interestingly, much of the cut scenes relate to the incredulous monitoring of the fortune-seekers by various law enforcement officers driving black-and-whites or riding in helicopters.

The cut footage also offers a short scene between Winters and Provine that provide Winters’s character with a selfless motive to want his share of the loot, a motive that’s completely absent in the short version. Moreover, there are a handful of great comedy bits the short version should have retained: Culpepper’s $5 bet with Police Chief Aloysius (William Demarest); Rancho Conejo air traffic controllers Carl Reiner and Eddie Ryder shaking hands, a last goodbye as Ding and Benjy’s out-of-control twin-engine plane is on a head-on collision course with their tower; a funny deleted line from cab driver Eddie “Rochester” Anderson near the climax.

The cut footage also make sense of continuity issues created by the short version, which had left viewers familiar only with that version baffled for years. They explain that the silver mine Otto Meyer speaks of is the place where the character played by Mike Mazurki lives. (I never realized this.) The long version also explains just why Hackett’s character is soaking wet in a couple of shots.

If ever there was a special edition prompted by consumer demand, it’s this. Though a popular catalog title, MGM was loathe to spend the vast sums of money a restoration/reconstructed would have required back in the ‘80s-through-early 2000s. Like David Strohmeier’s Cinerama restorations, IAMMMMW is only possible now because of cost-effective computer technologies that, combined with MGM’s preexisting HD master of the short version, now make such a release cost-effective.

The transfer of the extra-wide Ultra Panavision process (65mm, at 2.76:1) is impeccable, but then again it already was when the beleaguered MGM transferred the short version to HD a couple years ago. Excerpt for the new scenes, this is a same transfer as that, with only minor tweaking. The 5.1 surround, adapted from the original 6-track magnetic stereo, sounds great, a more noticeable improvement from MGM’s earlier Blu-ray of the short version. In addition to the original overture, entr’acte, and exit music, this release incorporates audio-only “police calls” heard sporadically throughout the intermission. All of this is over black, no title card, and there’s a lot of dead air between these calls but, apparently, that’s how they were spaced back in late 1963.

Criterion’s release offers both cuts of IAMMMMW on two Blu-ray discs and three DVDs, the third SD disc consisting of the same extra features spread across the two Blu-rays. The foldout packaging is nice, incorporating Jack Davis artwork commissioned for the 1970 rerelease. Inside there’s a booklet featuring an essay by Lou Lumenick and details about the film and sound elements sourced. Also included is a colorful but impractical map identifying some of the film’s shooting locations (Google Earth comes in very handy here).

Supplements are voluminous though curiously missing the “Something a Little Less Serious” documentary made for the 1991 home video version. That documentary featured Kramer and many more original cast members, all in better health and in greater number than they appear in the newer extras included here. “The Last 70mm Film Festival,” for instance, literally wheels-on Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney and Marvin Kaplan (one of the two gas station attendants whose business Winters’s character destroys), with Winters in good spirits but clearly not long for this world. Hosted by Billy Crystal and also featuring other cast and crewmembers, it’s a bit rambling, but enjoyable. (It’s a shame there’s no good video of the American Cinematheque screening I attended some years earlier, which had more of these folks and in far heartier shape.) Also included is a long excerpt from AFI’s 100 Years…100 Laughs focusing on IAMMMMW.

Other extras include original and reissue trailers; Stan Freberg’s TV and radio spots, which Freberg himself introduces; a two-part CBC program documenting the movie’s giant press junket and premiere; one-sided press interviews from 1963, featuring Kramer and his cast; an excerpt from a 1974 talk show hosted by Kramer and featuring Caesar, Hackett, and Winters; short but enlightening featurettes about the reconstruction process and another about the film’s visual and aural effects, including some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage.

And, best of all, there’s an informative and cozily personal audio commentary track on the long version by “Mad World aficionados” (they’re much more than that) Mark Evanier, Michael Schlesinger, and Paul Scrabo. It’s worth all 197 minutes.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World rates:

Movie: Excellent

Video: Excellent

Sound: Excellent

Supplements: Audio commentary, trailers, radio spots, press interviews, 1974 TV reunion, 2012 cast and crew reunion, Mad World locations map, AFI 100 Years…100 Laughs excerpt, featurettes on the reconstruction, sound and visual effects, booklet.

Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES (for the general release version).

Criterion 1963 / Color / 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision 70 / 197 and 163 min. / Street Date January 21, 2014 / $49.95

Starring Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine and a Few Surprises.

Director of Photography Ernest Laszlo

Music Ernest Gold

Written by William and Tania Rose

Produced and Directed by Stanley Kramer

Feature Articles

The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of: “Bulldog Jack” (1935)

January 8, 2014 Doug Krentzlin Leave a comment

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

The 1935 Gaumont-British comedy-thriller Bulldog Jack is almost entirely forgotten nowadays, which is ironic seeing as it was subsequently copied to death by the Hollywood studios. The basic premise is simple enough: An ordinary everyman (who’s also something of a well-meaning bumbler) dreams of becoming a heroic tough guy, the type who foils the bad guys and saves the proverbial damsel-in-distress. Fate conspires to place this everyman in real-life danger and, against all odds, he overcomes his fears, exposes the criminals, and successfully rescues the aforementioned damsel-in-distress, winning both the day and the girl. If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because several of Hollywood’s top comedians appeared in countless variations on the theme, including Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette, Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Jerry Lewis in It’s Only Money.

Bulldog Jack was the brainchild of its star, Jack Hulbert, who is credited for “idea and dialogue.” Hulbert was one of Britain’s top three film comedians of the 1930s, along with George Fromby and Will Hay. Writing about Bulldog Jack in his 1972 book The Detective in Film, British-born film historian William K. Everson stated, “Hulbert was a song-and-dance comic (though wisely keeping musical interludes out of this particular film) who followed the Harold Lloyd technique of combining comedy with thrill. He had a breezy, cheerful personality and good diction which made him far more acceptable to American audiences than many of the regional comics from Britain with their heavy local accents. His films were always solidly produced, with good sets, camerawork, and well-staged action scenes.” (In fact, I would never have even heard of Bulldog Jack if it hadn’t been for Everson’s enthusiastic recommendation of it.)

Jack Hulbert (left) with Mack Sennett (center), visiting the set, and director Walter Forde

Clocking in at a breathless 70 minutes, Bulldog Jack was directed by Walter Forde, with a screenplay by J.O.C. Orton, Gerard Fairlie, and Sidney Gilliat, “in collaboration with ‘Sapper’ [the pseudonym of author H.C. McNeile].” (Gilliat’s name is familiar to many movie buffs, not only in connection with the screenplays he co-wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn, but also for the films he wrote and directed himself, most notably the classic whodunit Green For Danger.) Instead of inventing a generic detective hero for the comic to emulate (as was the case in My Favorite Brunette and It’s Only Money), the writers made use of McNeile’s already widely popular fictional sleuth, Bulldog Drummond. So, in addition to being a first-rate comedy in itself, Bulldog Jack also functions as a sharp, incisive parody of the melodramatic excesses of the Bulldog Drummond novels as well. (Indeed, Bulldog Jack has stood the test of time better than any of the official Bulldog Drummond film adaptations.)

Bulldog Jack gets off to a wonderful start, with the credits accompanied by composer Louis Levy’s appropriately dramatic overture, and interrupted briefly by a gunshot and one of co-star Fay Wray’s patented ear-splitting screams. (Wray was still at the height of her loveliness, having recently played the ultimate damsel-in-distress in King Kong, and made a most fetching heroine for Hulbert to rescue.)

The real Bulldog Drummond, played by Atholl Fleming (accurately described by Everson as “rather too mature and stolid an actor for the role”), only appears in the film’s first five minutes. In an introductory sequence worthy of Hitchcock himself, we see two sinister figures out in the British countryside in the dead of night, obviously up to no good as they tap a telephone pole’s lines and listen in on a conversation between Drummond and Ann Manders (Wray) in which she entreats the celebrated amateur sleuth to come to her aid. Unfortunately, Drummond mentions that he’ll need to stop for gas before meeting Miss Manders at his flat in London. So the two villains hightail it to the only gas station in that isolated area, bind and gag the attendant, and one of them takes his place. When Drummond arrives, accompanied by his pet terrier, the bogus attendant waits on him while his accomplice lurks behind Drummond’s car and sabotages the brake line.

Blithely unaware of the danger he’s in, Drummond drives down a steep, winding stretch of road ominously known as “Devil’s Elbow.” As he futilely tries to pump the brakes, the film cross-cuts between his automobile and another car heading up the road from the opposite direction. The two cars collide, completely overturning Drummond’s auto. The driver of the other car, a professional cricket player named Jack Pennington (Hulbert), sticks his head out of the window and casually inquires whether this is “the right way to Gilford.” The only response he receives is Drummond’s terrier sticking its head out of passenger window of the overturned car. Jack politely thanks the pooch and gets out of his car.

Jack accompanies Drummond, who has suffered a broken arm, and his dog on the ambulance ride to the hospital. After exchanging introductions, Jack fawns over the famous detective and expresses his lifelong desire to become a detective himself. Since he’s obviously out of commission for the time being, Drummond asks Jack to impersonate him long enough to interview Miss Manders and determine exactly who and what is threatening her. Needless to say, despite the potential danger, Jack gladly accepts the assignment.

Upon Jack’s arrival at Drummond’s flat, we are introduced to two supporting characters well known to followers of the Drummond novels, the first being Drummond’s faithful, unflappable manservant Denny, played here by Gibb McLaughlin, best remembered for his work in David Lean’s early films. The second familiar character to appear is Drummond’s perennial sidekick, “Algy” (short for Algernon) Longworth, the very embodiment of that archetype affectionately known as “a silly-ass Englishman.” In Bulldog Jack, Algy is played by Hulbert’s brother Claude, an accomplished comedian in his own right. (Few British comics could do “silly-ass” better than Claude Hulbert.) Algy agrees to go along with Pennington’s impersonation of Drummond and the two act as a team for the remainder of the movie. (The dynamic between the Hulbert Brothers is rather reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy, with Jack driven to a perpetual state of exasperation by Claude’s ineffectualness.)

The next person knocking on Drummond’s door, much to Jack’s disappointment, is not Ann, but rather an elderly foreigner (Paul Graetz) who claims that criminals are pressuring him into participating in a crime involving “the Goddess with a Hundred Hands.” (“Do you know what they want me to do?” the old man asks. “Wash them?” Algy guesses.) The man’s pleas are interrupted by the arrival of a couple of strangers who identify themselves as policemen. Convinced they’re imposters, Jack locks them in the kitchen while two other men, also identifying themselves as police, show up. Jack, however, smugly declares these two to be authentic and turns the old man over to them. Not surprisingly, the first set of men are the real cops and the second two are minions of the master criminal behind the sinister goings-on.

At last, Ann herself arrives (Jack is, of course, immediately smitten with her) and the plot finally gets underway. As Ann explains, the old man is Salvini, her grandfather, and he’s an expert jeweler whose professional services are required by the master criminal in question, one Professor Morelle. Played by a young Ralph Richardson (with bushy mustache and gray fright wig) in one of his early film appearances, Morelle is a satirical take-off on such sinister literary masterminds as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. (One of the main reasons that Bulldog Jack works so well is that Richardson, Wray, and all the other supporting actors play their roles absolutely straight, and only the Hulberts play it for laughs.)

The caper Morelle is planning is the theft of a priceless set of jewels embedded in the gigantic multi-armed statue of the Indian goddess Kali that is kept at the British Museum. Morelle needs Salvini to create replicas of the jewels that will be indistinguishable from the real thing, so that they can be substituted for the originals. When Savini refuses to give in to Morelle’s threats, Ann is also kidnapped by Morelle’s henchmen, and it’s up to Jack and Algy to track down Morelle’s secret lair and save her and her grandfather from the villain’s evil clutches.

In their quest, Jack and Algy are put through a series of perils typical of the average Bulldog Drummond story. At one point, they’re locked in a basement storeroom. (Algy suggests burning their way out. It isn’t until the fire is blazing out of control that it occurs to them that they might be incinerated as well.) They deduce that Morelle’s hideout must be located somewhere in London’s underground subway tunnels and—you can see this one coming a mile away—they’re forced to outrun a train when they start down a seemingly empty tunnel. (By the way, the film’s special effects are flawlessly done, particularly the miniatures used in the climax.)

After sending Algy to go alert the police, Jack eventually reaches Morelle’s underground hideout, but his attempt to spirit Ann and her grandfather out of there by impersonating Morelle and hoodwinking his gang is spoiled by the inevitable appearance of Morelle himself. It’s at this point that Morelle demolishes Ann’s trust in Jack (she still thinks he’s Bulldog Drummond) by exposing him as a fraud and imposter (the film’s only touch of pathos). Undeterred, Jack still hopes to prove himself to Ann and give Morelle his well-deserved comeuppance.

There are some highly amusing sight gags in Bulldog Jack, most notably a literal running gag in which the good guys and bad guys are constantly hurrying up or down the London Underground’s circular staircases (an image beautifully punctuated by Levy’s score) and a frenzied nighttime chase through the London Museum after hours when Jack interrupts Morelle and his men in mid-robbery, climaxed by Jack utilizing the museum’s collection of Aboriginal boomerangs against the villains. At first, Jack successfully knocks out several of Morelle’s henchmen (complete with comic sound effects), but, as comedy tradition demands, the last boomerang he flings backfires on him.

The dangers that Jack faces in the last fifteen minutes of the movie would not be out of place in an Indiana Jones film, with an emphasis on suspense rather than comedy. Jack pursues Morelle down to the subway tunnels and the two of them fight it out on the tracks, with the electrified third rail and an oncoming train posing serious threats. Finally, in a last-ditch act of sheer desperation, Morelle hijacks a subway train with Jack, Algy, Ann, and Salvini aboard. Intending to commit murder/suicide by crashing the train when it reaches the end of the line, Morelle locks himself in the lead train’s cab and Jack’s only hope of stopping him is to crawl out over the top of the moving train and get into the cab via the front door.

Now, alas, for the bad news. The video transfer on the Region 1 DVD release by a company called Firecake Entertainment leaves something to be desired. At first glance, the image seems to be sharp enough, but it soon becomes apparent that there’s some rather annoying fuzziness in the picture. Although, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that this fuzziness is not bad enough to make the DVD unwatchable. (Lord knows, the transfer is nowhere near as bad as those 5th or 6th generation public domain dubs that have plagued unwitting video purchasers for decades.) The soundtrack, however, is clean and the dialogue is quite audible, which isn’t always the case in British films of the period.

On the plus side, Bulldog Jack definitely qualifies as “family friendly” entertainment. As Everson explained in his program notes for a 1963 New York screening of Bulldog Jack: “There was a lot of ‘blue’ comedy in the British films of the 30s, some admittedly very funny. Hulbert’s were always scrupulously clean.” Even if you’ve seen any of the numerous Hollywood knock-offs of Bulldog Jack, I think you’ll agree that the original can’t be topped, in terms of both laughs and thrills.

Feature Articles

Walter Mitty and Other Daydreamers

December 14, 2013 Anthony Balducci 5 Comments

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), a Technicolor musical comedy produced by Samuel Goldwyn, casts Danny Kaye as an imaginative editor of pulp books. It is not my favorite Kaye vehicle. I recommend that, if you are in the mood for a good double feature, you get your hands on DVD’s of Kaye’s Wonder Man (1945) and The Court Jester (1956). But, even though the various elements of Mitty never cohere, the film provides a number of entertaining scenes that make it worth a spin on your DVD player.

Critics have never had a problem summarizing the plot of Mitty in a few words. It is the story of “a daydreaming everyman” or “a little man with big dreams.” But, despite the great popularity of the James Thurber short story on which the film was based, the Mitty character was not the original daydreamer protagonist. It was not uncommon in early comedy films to have a drudge let their thoughts drift off and imagine themselves in a fantastic situation. This was certainly the case with a 1914 Essanay comedy called Sweedie and the Hypnotist. Sweedie (Wallace Beery in drag) is a scrub woman in a theatre. Sweedie takes a break from sweeping to watch a hypnotist (Leo White) perform on stage and soon finds herself lulled into a trance. At this point, the scrub woman imagines herself in an exciting adventure in which the hypnotist and the stage manager are battling for her hand in marriage. The premise proves to be nothing more than an excuse for a slapstick melee. At one point, the stage manager gets the hypnotist out of the way by pushing him into a trunk. The daydream almost turned out to be a nightmare for White. According to a news report, the production was halted when White became trapped inside the trunk and nearly suffocated.

Even in 1914, the plot of Sweedie and the Hypnotist was trite stuff. The janitor who leans against his broom and gets a faraway look in his eyes became a familiar image in comedy films. It was due to the influence of Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court that most daydreamers envisioned themselves in ancient times. In Hogan’s Aristocratic Dream (1915), a tramp (Charlie Murray) dreams that he is a nobleman in pre-revolutionary France. A film that distinctly combined the two daydreaming genres, the dawdling laborer and the time-traveling fantasist, was The Knight Watch (1929), in which a movie studio janitor (Arthur Lake) watches actors perform as merry knights on a medieval set and imagines himself as a brave knight.

A Mitty-type story formed the basis of Reaching for the Moon (1917). Alexis Brown (Douglas Fairbanks), a lowly clerk in a button factory, dreams that he is royal heir, but he finds at the film’s conclusion that the moon is out of his grasp. This is how the film ends according to the TCM website: “While dueling for his life. . . , Alexis falls over a cliff and awakens to discover that he has merely tumbled out of bed. Thus disabused of his fantasies, Alexis eagerly returns to his life in the button factory, proposes to Elsie Merrill, his down-to-earth sweetheart, and eventually finds happiness as a family man in a New Jersey suburb.” The lesson is that fantasies are bad and the daydreamer is better off keeping his feet planted firmly on the ground.

Buster Keaton explored the world of daydreams in two films. In Daydreams (1922), Keaton goes to the big city to make his fortune. He writes vague letters to his girlfriend (Renée Adorée) to mislead her about his lack of success. Adorée, hopeful that her boyfriend will make money to marry her, imagines Keaton doing well as a surgeon, a stock broker, and a police captain. Keaton elaborated on the daydreaming idea in a feature-length film, Sherlock, Jr. (1924). This time, Keaton is able to discover his inner strength when he daydreams that he is a super sleuth. This more positive perspective on daydreams established a trend in films that still persists today.

Harold Lloyd played daydreamers in his most popular films. In Girl Shy (1924), he imagines himself as a great seducer of women. The comedian used his character’s fantasies as an opportunity to spoof romantic melodramas of the day. A scene in which he seduces a vamp parodies a scene from Trifling Women (1922) and a scene in which he seduces a flapper parodies a scene from Flaming Youth (1923). The Freshman (1925) opens with Lloyd anxiously preparing to leave home for college. He wants, more than anything, to be popular on campus. So, he dresses up like a college hero pictured on a movie poster and performs college cheers while studying his image in his bedroom mirror. The Kid Brother (1927) includes a similar scene in which Lloyd daydreams in a mirror wearing his sheriff father’s badge and hat. This is a form of self-actualization. The idea is that you can be the person that you want to be if you first visualize yourself as that person. See it, be it. This continues Keaton’s idea that daydreams can mold a person and guide them onto a path of success.

Warner Brothers’ How Baxter Butted In (1925), which was based on a 1905 Broadway musical comedy by Owen Davis, was a definite forerunner to Mitty. Baxter, a young clerk in a newspaper office, always has fantasies in which he defends his sweetheart against the villainous office manager. It is the clerk’s dreams of bravery that eventually allows him to embrace true bravery. Nothing other than his daydreams facilitate his transformation from a timid failure to a brave hero.

How Baxter Butted In was remade as The Great Mr. Nobody in 1941. The story was changed a bit to suit the times. The timid Robert Smith (Eddie Albert), known to his friends as Dreamy, fantasizes about performing heroic deeds. Dreamy makes his living selling advertisements at a newspaper. The same imagination that produces Dreamy’s fantasies also aides him in producing compelling advertisements. But Dreamy has a boss who takes credit for his best ideas. The lack of credit for his ideas denies Dreamy rewards, whether a promotion or extra pay, and this disempowers him. A person cannot be disempowered unless they have power at the start. In the end, Dreamy finds his courage, takes action, and is finally recognized for his value. He is presented as the ultimate hero when, in the final scene, he joins the military.

Key plot details of The Great Mr. Nobody could be later found in the Mitty film. Like Dreamy, Mitty had gone into an appropriate profession. The same imagination that creates Mitty’s fantasies also creates popular adventure stories for his publisher. This is very different than Fairbanks working in a button factory. Unlike buttons, advertisements and adventure stories trade in fantasy and it takes a man with an affinity for fantasy to be successful in these fields. But Mitty shares another problem with Dreamy – his boss takes credit for his ideas.

James Thurber’s story, which ran a scant two and a half pages, had no need for character development, conflict resolution, or a villainous boss. Mitty is a henpecked middle-aged husband whose sole objective in the story is to stop at a grocery store to buy puppy biscuits. In a review of Ben Stiller’s new CGI-enhanced Mitty, Peter Debruge of Variety appropriately referred to Thurber’s story as “plotless source material.” Still, many readers identified with Mitty, which made this Thurber’s most popular work. The scriptwriters, Ken Englund, Everett Freeman and Philip Rapp, had to find a way to expand the thin story for a feature film. Their basic ideas were sound. The writers established that, as the only son of an overbearing single mother, Mitty has been stunted in his development, which has made him passive in his relationships. He is unable to stand up to his mother, his boss, and his fiancé. He escapes into fantasy whenever he is humiliated or badgered. He seeks in his fantasies the respect and excitement that he is denied in his real life. In his fantasies, he imagines himself as a fighter pilot, a ship captain, a riverboat gambler, and a Western gunfighter.

So, there we have it, an ineffectual man uses daydreams as a way of escape from his dreary existence. Should we feel glad that this common man is able to uplift himself and subvert his suppressors through his imagination? Or, should we feel sad that this man needs to retreat to a fantasy world to find triumph? Is his escape into a daydream a form of victory or defeat? Keaton and Lloyd already provided the answer to that question. Now, rather than the daydreams being a way of escape, they were a way to bring to the fore the innermost power and ambition that is straining to burst loose from a man. Mitty’s purpose in the enlarged story is to act on his fantasies and fulfill his potential.

Unfortunately, Goldwyn’s Mitty goes wrong after the first act. To start, the film provides too much gloss and glamour for a comedy. Comedy is about sweaty brows, mussed hair, and torn britches. But this isn’t the only problem with the film. The story stops cold whenever Kaye performs one of his trademark patter-songs. These boldly silly numbers, including “Anatole of Paris” and “Symphony for Unstrung Tongue,” are unsuitable business for the shy Mitty and they are entirely irrelevant to the story. It might have worked better if the musical numbers were incorporated into the fantasy scenes. Thurber thought that the musical numbers, which he termed “git-gat-giddle songs,” were “deplorable.” He especially objected to the fact that, to make room for the songs, Goldwyn had to leave out fantasy scenes, including one scene in which Mitty imagines himself as a trial lawyer and another scene in which Mitty imagines himself being led before a firing squad. In the short story, Mitty’s fantasy hero comes to a dark end before a firing squad. Sylvia Fine, Kaye’s wife and manager, strongly objected to the trial and firing squad scenes and she proved to have more authority in the matter than Thurber.

Another glaring weakness of the film is its leading lady, Virginia Mayo. No matter how pretty Mayo looks in Technicolor, she contributes little to the film with her lifeless performance. She is so stilted at times that she could be a dress dummy from Goldwyn’s wardrobe department.

By far, the biggest problem with the film is that the daydream scenes simply don’t work. The film includes five daydream scenes, three of which turn up in the first twenty minutes. The film goes on for another hour and half, during which time the remaining two daydream sequences are dropped into the action at random times. It is as if the filmmakers lost interest in Mitty’s fantasies. It is immediately funny seeing Buster Keaton as a surgeon in Daydreams, but Kaye does not look out of place as a surgeon. The dream scenes lack a parodic dimension that the viewer should expect. The scenes lack humorous touches, furnishing no gags, or pratfalls, or funny lines. Kaye’s performance needed to be more campy as a way to give a wink to the audience. The one time that the scriptwriters allowed a fantasy scene to get funny was during Mitty’s efforts at surgery. Surely, they couldn’t have allowed the surgery to be serious. Surgeon Mitty is aided by a silly-looking machine that goes “ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa” and he completes the procedure using a sock stretcher, a sprinkling can, a cheese grater and floor wax.

After the first twenty minutes of the film, Mitty’s daydreams can easily recede as the pulp editor’s real life has become more dynamic than his daydreams. His dangerous encounters with the spies renders the fantasy segments unnecessary. The film would function well as a spy comedy if Thurber’s daydream scenes were jettisoned altogether. Still, Kaye gets to perform some great comic business as he struggles with inanimate objects (a chair and a water cooler) and makes a desperate effort to avoid being injured by deadly spies and a burly irate husband. The husband is justifiably upset by Mitty’s interest in a corset delivered to his wife. Little does the flustered husband know that the corset is the hiding place for a notebook with information that can thwart a Nazi plot.

Animator Chuck Jones was more successful with the daydreaming premise when he depicted an imaginative boy named Ralph Phillips in From A to ZZZ (1953) and Boyhood Daze (1957). The daydreamer protagonist has continued to be used effectively in films, including Billy Liar (1963) and Brazil (1985). Brazil was described by its director, Terry Gilliam, as “Walter Mitty Meets Franz Kafka.” The premise was strong enough to sustain a number of television series, including The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–1979), The Singing Detective (1986) and Dream On (1990-1996). Snoopy of the Peanuts comic strip was no doubt in Mitty territory whenever he imagined himself to be a World War I flying ace.

The latest version of Mitty is meant to be smarter and less silly than its predecessor. I haven’t seen this remake yet, but I have read a few reviews. Debruge wrote, “Rather than channeling James Thurber’s satirical tone, [Ben] Stiller plays it mostly earnest, spinning what feels like a feature-length ‘Just Do It’ ad for restless middle-aged auds [audiences], on whom its reasonably commercial prospects depend.” In other words, it takes the idea that fantasies are motivational to an extreme.

Daydreams can provide us with a dress rehearsal for our lives and, at the same time, they can allow us to release deeply creative ideas. Films that celebrate daydreams are worthwhile. I just wish that Goldwyn’s Mitty had focused more on that idea.

Anthony Balducci has written three books on silent film comedy. He is presently at work on a book called I Won’t Grow Up!: What Comedy Films Have to Teach Us About Maturity, Responsibility and Masculinity. He has been a devoted blogger since 2000. You can visit his current blog at http://anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/.

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