It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

How do you prep a kid in the modern age for this film? One of the radical differences in the way we consume entertainment today than how we did from the sixties through the eighties is that it’s perfectly understandable that a kid could reach the age of ten without knowing who anybody in this silly and hilarious epic is. I think I must have been about twelve when I first saw It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on HBO around 1983. My dad saw it in the monthly program book and cancelled all potential plans; we were watching that movie. And then, I remember being amazed because I knew who so many of the actors were. Him! Her and him! That guy! Milton Berle! The millionaire from Gilligan’s Island! Mearth from Mork & Mindy! The mechanic from The Love Bug!

Today? The only reason any kid would know any of these jokers is if their parents are showing them entertainment from the past. Choices were so limited then that when we wanted to watch TV, we often settled. We were often pleasantly surprised and amused, but kids today get to watch whatever they want whenever they want – which is how it should be – while we grew up watching whatever we thought was the best of the eight or nine options available. So occasionally we’d run into Jerry Lewis or Mickey Rooney or Peter Falk or Sid Caesar or Edie Adams or Ethel Merman or Terry-Thomas or Jonathan Winters or Phil Silver and be happily entertained, but what we really wanted was for somebody to make TV shows where Spider-Man and the Hulk fought actual supervillains and had them on demand to watch whenever we wanted. Kids today have that. The comic heroes of the past will be lost to time. Nothing lasts forever.

(A question went around on Twitter yesterday, one with which we were sometimes confronted: The Andy Griffith Show or The Beverly Hillbillies? The answer, of course, is “the sweet, merciful embrace of death.”)

So what prep work was there for our son? Well, I told him that he saw Terry-Thomas as Cousin Archie in a Persuaders! we saw recently, and he was sure to remember Milton Berle being heckled offstage by Statler and Waldorf in one of the finest moments in all of The Muppet Show, and…

…and he’d just have to trust me, because one of the most amazing things about Mad World is just about every speaking part in the movie is played by somebody that audiences in 1963, 1973, 1983, probably 1993 knew. In 1983, my dad had forgotten that the two service station attendants who briefly bedevil Jonathan Winters were actors even he knew. I remember him saying “That’s Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan!”

The other bit of prep work that I could do was remind him of the Three Stooges. You never know how this kid’s memory works. I picked up the complete DVD set some time back, but we’ve only seen a few, and it’s been a while, so we sat down to “Three Little Beers,” the one with the press, press, pull gag, yesterday afternoon. He about lost his mind, and I reminded him that there is absolutely no situation that the Stooges cannot make far, far worse. Had to make sure to set up their brief appearance here.

I’m confident anybody reading this is familiar with the movie, though it’s possible you may not be aware of how much antipathy there is in the movie snob world about it. A few months ago, when I got interested in the Criterion Collection again, I read the World thread at their forum and was surprised to see it get so much hate. I think it’s absolute slapstick joy myself, and the kid, dying of laughter, completely agreed, but you see Dorothy Provine in the center of the top picture, finding this whole thing unamusing if not disgusting and ready to call the police to round up these greedy jackasses? That’s my wife, that is. She didn’t come back from the intermission.

Never mind the haters. Watch this movie with a kid. Prep them as best you can beforehand so they’ll know what pay phones are, and let it rip. They’ll probably miss a few of the gags, like Spencer Tracy making his decisions, or Berle’s face when Merman asks where she should stick a cactus, but Silvers’ car and Winters at the garage will have them howling. It’s a little dated, and I suppose it will one day be forgotten, but until then, it’s sure to make me laugh so hard that my left eye will still be hurting an hour later. You probably don’t need the five-disc version, but as Mark Evanier, one of the contributors to the commentary track, will tell you, the two Blu-ray Criterion will do you just fine. See you at the Big W.

The Persuaders! 1.14 – The Man in the Middle

Before we watched tonight’s delightful and extremely fun episode of The Persuaders!, Donald James’s “The Man in the Middle,” I told our son to look out for Terry-Thomas. I reminded him that we’ve seen him once before, in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and he’s hardly playing against type here. Thomas specialized in variations of the same part: a comically obnoxious, cowardly aristocrat who’s always happy to stick other people with the bill. One thing that our little sample run of this series has mostly missed is Lord Brett Sinclair’s curious family tree. Here, Thomas is a distant cousin, and Brett is so desperate to get away from him that he completely forgets that two rival intelligence agencies are tracking him and that he has to lay low for the next twelve hours, and walks straight into a trap.

Geraldine Moffat is also in this one, which had the kid guffawing loudly as Danny tries to rescue Brett from the enemy power’s embassy while Archie provides as little help as possible. It’s really very funny. I’ve praised the writer several times over the course of this blog for all the great scripts he penned for ITC, but this was really one of his best even before Thomas got involved and making it even better. I told the kid that we’ll be seeing the actor once more in about a month.

But surprisingly, I didn’t actually pick this episode for its guest stars like I normally do. Always glad to see good guests like Thomas and Moffat, but I chose this one because there’s a bit at the end where Danny tries to build a road block to keep the baddies from driving out of town and it doesn’t work like he’d hoped. I remember that I really liked that gag when Marie and I watched this series a couple of years ago, and I figured correctly that the kid would like it as well. He agreed that was the episode’s best moment, and despite all the other amusing hijinks, fights, and shootouts, I agree.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965)

The town of Collegedale is just up the road from us, and every year they have an event at their municipal airport where you get to go up in a tiny little plane – room enough for the pilot and three passengers – for about ten minutes for free. Well, there’s a long line, so it costs time, but you don’t have to take your shoes off for Homeland Security either. So our son was hopping up and down when we told him what we were doing that Sunday, and he waited with astonishing patience. Then we left the ground and the color left his face and he bit his lip and he didn’t start crying until we were down and safe, but he sobbed for longer than we were in the air. He was horrified, and he never, ever wants to get in an airplane ever again.

But watching other people crash in absurdly unsafe contraptions, that he’ll watch all day. I told him that I thought that since he enjoyed The Great Race so much he would also enjoy this, he beamed and asked, “Will there be sabotage? I hope there’s a bad guy who sabotages the other planes!” And indeed there is. The evil Sir Percy is played by Terry-Thomas, and while he doesn’t get quite as much screen time as Jack Lemmon did in Race – there are, after all, far more characters in this – he’s still a bounder and a very entertaining villain. At one point, he’s ready to trade punches with Stuart Whitman’s character. Whitman socks him in the nose instantly and I laughed for five minutes.

The backdrop for the movie is a London to Paris air race in 1910, arranged by a rich media tycoon, played by Robert Morley, to drive circulation of his paper and prove that Britannia rules the skies. “The trouble with these international affairs is that they attract foreigners,” he grumbles at one point. That’s a great line, but sadly, the greater trouble is that I have to break out the “unflattering cultural stereotypes” tag again, because the very broad caricatures, and the ugly slang that the posh British characters employ, is the only weak part of this otherwise very funny film.

I have to note that as much as our son guffawed and giggled, the movie’s prologue was possibly every bit as effective as the next two hours in making him roar with laughter. You’ve all seen some of that very old film footage of doomed-to-crash sky cars hopping up and down and that plane with a dozen stacked sets of wings collapsing in on itself? Well, this kid hadn’t. I figured that if he enjoyed the actual movie half as much as the old stock footage, it’d be a success.

Helping the movie along, there’s a great cast of familiar faces and even a familiar location. Robert Morley’s house is Fulmer Hall in Buckinghamshire, where John Steed was living in the second series of The New Avengers. I think we last saw the house just thirty days ago! And as for talent, Stuart Whitman and James Fox are the principal competitors and rivals, with Sarah Miles caught in a love triangle between them. Gert Fröbe leads what you might call the B-team of Prussian, French, and Italian competitors. And there are small roles for three big names of British TV comedy in the sixties: Benny Hill, Tony Hancock, and Eric Sykes.

Those Magnificent Men… never feels long at 138 minutes, but it certainly feels epic. It’s a big, ridiculous film full of stunts, practical effects, giant crowds of extras, gorgeous old cars and beat-up old airplanes. It’s also got a lovely recurring gag with one actress playing six different women of different nationalities. It’s dated, unfortunately so in a couple of places, but it’s still a very good and very funny film.