...with so much talent on display, the filmmakers were bound to come up with a few tasty morsels, and the film continues to delight in bits and pieces.
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Bigger doesn´t always mean better, as producer-director Stanley Kramer found out when he released "It´s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" in 1963. This big, sprawling chase film starred or included just about every major comedic actor of the day, its running time surpassed the three-hour mark, and its Ultra Panavision 70 dimensions, 2:76:1, were presented in the Cinerama format. In fact, when I first saw it in its road-show engagement, it was about the biggest, longest, and most all-star vehicle I had ever experienced. Was it all worth the effort? It was enormously popular, and I loved it at the time. But in retrospect it shows its faults, providing not nearly the number of the laughs per minute I had remembered.
Anyway, for its regular theatrical run it was cut to 35mm and about 160 minutes, which is essentially what we have on this DVD. Fortunately, the surviving extra scenes, what little remain of them, are offered as part of MGM´s bonus package on side two. In all, the disc contains some five hours of material, so the mad, mad, mad, mad viewer gets his money´s worth of mad, mad, mad, mad matter.
The movie´s story is a testament to people´s personal and collective greed, a theme that runs throughout the film and whose cynicism after a while may just begin dulling the humor. The show begins when a crook named Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante in his last screen appearance) kicks the bucket, literally. He drives his car off a cliff in the middle of the Mojave Desert, but just before he dies he tells four carloads of witnesses to the accident where he hid $350,000 in stolen money (and that was in ´63; think millions today). The startled onlookers include a dim-bulbed truck driver (Jonathan Winters); a henpecked husband (Milton Berle), his wife (Dorothy Provine), and his bellowing mother-in-law (Ethel Merman); a dentist (Sid Caesar) and his wife (Edie Adams); and a pair of fellows on their way to Las Vegas (Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett).
Closely monitoring Grogan´s activities is his old nemesis, an honest cop named Culpepper (Spencer Tracy), who´s been on Grogan´s tail for fifteen years. Thinking that the onlookers will lead him to Grogan´s loot, he lets the group hightail it to the cash, insisting that no one interfere with them as they all rush toward the fictional Santa Rosita Beach State Park where the money is supposed to be buried under a "big W." And thus the chase begins in the manner of an old Keystone Kops comedy, each man and woman for him or her self, leaving everyone and everything a shambles in their path.
Along the way, the characters meet practically every funnyman in Hollywood, mostly in cameos, many without even a line of dialogue. Spotting the stars in bit parts is part of the film´s fun, but I´ll mention a few of these folks so you´ll get the idea. There´s Dick Shawn as Berle´s brother-in-law, a lazy lifeguard who comes to "save" his mama. Phil Silvers basically reprises his old Sgt. Bilko routine as a fast-talking con artist who gives a lift to Winters when his truck breaks down. Terry-Thomas is his usual pompous Englishman in a tailor-made role. Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Peter Falk, and Leo Gorcey play cab drivers enlisted to help the crew toward the end of the picture. Jim Backus seems to have been preparing for his role as the snobby millionaire on "Gilligan´s Island" by playing a snobby millionaire. Ben Blue is the pilot of a dilapidated World War I biplane. Longtime character actor William Demarest plays Culpepper´s old friend, the Chief of Police. Paul Ford is Col. Wilberforce, who tries to talk down Rooney and Hackett when they accidentally get behind the stick of a plane they hire but can´t fly.
Then, there are Edward Everett Horton, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Carl Reiner, the Three Stooges, Joe E. Brown, Andy Devine, Sterling Holloway, Marvin Kaplan, Arnold Stang, ZaSu Pitts, Jesse White, Lloyd Corrigan, Stan Freberg, Norman Fell, Allen Jenkins, Harry Lauter, Doodles Weaver, Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Selma Diamond, Cliff Norton, Roy Roberts, and too many others to name. By intermission, Caesar and his wife are caught in the basement of a burning building, Silvers is floating down a river in his car, Berle is hanging off a cliff with Thomas trying to beat him senseless, Rooney and Hackett are flying a plane neither of them can pilot, and Tracy is being driven to distraction.
I recall a critic at the time of the film´s release saying that never had so many done so much to produce so little. I think that might be a bit unfair. It´s true that with so much high-powered talent at his disposal, Stanley Kramer should have been able to come up with something that hung together better plot-wise and provided more belly laughs. But the film has held up with audiences pretty well through the years, and it´s still a favorite today of many admirers and considered a classic by others. I found the film becoming tiresome and repetitious by the second half, its more condensed running time perhaps a blessing in disguise.
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