It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) MGM/UA DVD

by ANDY IHNATKO

I was driving to my storage unit one sticky and sucky day this summer when I happened upon a billboard that instantly filled my heart with unbounded joy and sent my soul slopping over with the milk of human kindness, et cetera.

It depicted about a dozen mid-level celebrities in caricature form, with big heads and tiny bodies. They were all chasing after another big headed/tiny bodied celebrity who was clutching an enormous sack of money, while a trail of currency fluttered in a trail around and along the entire scene.

The experience was not unlike hiking through the woods and spying a California Condor or a Ring-Spotted Junkatiel or an elk carrying a belt-sander or any of the other rare specimens that naturalists are always getting themselves all worked up about. A great species that once roamed the Americas in mighty herds is coming back. In the glory days of the Sixties and Seventies, you couldn't heave a box of stale Jujubes without hitting a poster like that, usually drawn by MAD artist Jack Davis, and as often as not with Dom DeLuise lurking in the lineup somewhere.

The movie that inspired this recent joy was RAT RACE, starring several people who'd done much better movies in other decades and/or other countries. But the grand-daddy of the Big Heads Chasing After Something On The Poster genre was, of course, "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."

IA(4M)W is good, solid, workmanlike filmmaking. I mean, it's good that we have films like "The Godfather" and "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and "Gone With The Wind." But if you think the determination to push the dramatic and creative envelope has always resulted in pure Tabasco, go rent "The Prince Of Tides" sometime. On second thought, don't; it'll only encourage Barbra to direct again.

No, the only true New Concept that this flick works with is the idea that if a good movie can be made using Great Leaps, then the same distance can be covered with dozens of tiny steps, too. Instead of a great, towering epic story, IA(4M)W is filled with dozens of great little scenes. Instead of two timeless thespians of our age carrying the film, there are a dozen recognizable faces sharing the load, and a dozen more salted throughout the flick here and there like truffles among the lichens.

That's actually where this film has made its true contribution to film. As the decades roll on, so many of the names in IA(4M)W's credits send viewers scrambling to the Internet Movie Database for a refresher. Unless a great comic star of the Fifties and Sixties had the foresight to only work on TV shows that they knew would be endlessly rerun on "Nick At Night" in thirty years' time, their ample talents aren't being showcased to modern audiences.

In IA(4M)W, you get to see Ethel Merman outside of the cast albums of "Gypsy" and "Annie Get Your Gun." You get to see people like Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis as comic actors, which is what there were before they chose to become Entertainers. You get to see people like Jim Backus and Terry-Thomas, themselves an endangered species of actors who developed one signature comic character and inhabited it so perfectly in performance after performance that the schtick never grew stale. You get to see Sid Caesar misused in a role that gives him little opportunity to shine, but you do get to see why Don Knotts will one day finally be recognized as the true singular genius that he is. And you'll understand why people like Robin Williams emphatically hail Jonathan Winters as a true actor and master of his craft.

See, if someone wants to know just why so many people think Phil Silvers was a genius, you can't send them to Blockbuster for tapes of his TV run as Sgt. Bilko. But a copy of IA(4M)W is just a ten-minute drive from anywhere. Iconographic comic actors like Silvers have gone from being famous TV stars to "that bald fast-talking guy with the glasses." Without IA(4M)W, it's likely that modern viewers would only know Silvers anonymously as the vocal style and mannerisms that Hanna-Barbera ripped off and morphed into "Top Cat"...a character who, this world being a nothing but a vale of tears, has outlived and out-thrived "Bilko" in syndication.

In the face of all this, it seems cheap to note that as a mere point of fact, IA(4M)W is three hours of cheap, corny laughs and old-school mondo-destructo stuntwork. It's true. No doubt about that. But crimeny, if Arnold Stang attempting to stand between Jonathan Winters and the destruction of his gas station doesn't obliterate that quibble from your mind, I just can't help you.

That's a whole lot of praise for a movie that I have a real dislike for, isn't it?

IA(4M)W is unique in my moviegoing experience. Never have I liked a movie so much and hated its ending so passionately. I absolutely loathe it. I hated it the first time I saw it, and fifteen years of viewing hasn't softened that reaction a bit. The moment the final scenes begin, I can feel the heat rising from between my shoulder blades until it reaches the back of my skull and my jaw clenches involuntarily and the hate starts to burn away much of the fond feelings I'd been building up about the flick over the previous few hours.

(Spoilers ahoy)

Spencer Tracy, the police captain who's been investigating the case of the stolen $350,000 for over a decade, has seized the briefcase containing the fortune and double-crossed the fortune-seekers, sending them to the police station to turn themselves in while he himself high-tails it to Mexico. They soon catch on and ultimately pursue him onto a rickety fire escape which, after the contents of the briefcase case spill in a massive cloud of cash to the crowd below, begins to collapse under all that weight. A fire truck arrives and extends a hundred-foot ladder to their rescue. They all pile on it at once and the machine malfunctions, spinning and bucking wildly and throwing everyone off one by one.

Ha ha. Ho ho.

Allow me to explain. It is hysterically funny when Wile E. Coyote experiences sudden deceleration phenomena at point of interface with a canyon floor. Director Chuck Jones shows us Wiley standing at the edge of a cliff with an Acme Super-Atomic Rocket strapped to his back. Then he shows the fuse being lit, the unbalanced weight of the rocket unexpectedly causing Wiley to tip forward, followed by the rocket's ignition, a white vapor trail straight down, and a soft, distant "Thop!"...all in the space of an instant.

But Stanley Kramer, the director of IA(4M)W, screwed it all up. He shot this scene as drama, not comedy. He desperately wants us to see how high up they are. He has to show us how terrified they are and how shocked and horrified the hundreds of onlookers are.

Ha ho hee hee ha ha ha.

We see men thrown onto high-tension lines and electrocuted again and again, shrieking in pain. We cut to their loved ones, traumatized by what they're witnessing. We see people thrown hundreds of feet and landing on concrete, or flung a hundred yards and ultimately through through plate glass.

Stop it...you're killin' me!

And these are people whom we've generally grown to like over the past few hours. The cast isn't particularly filled with bad people. Sid Caesar plays a gentle dentist, Milton Berle a browbeaten husband. Jonathan Winters is clearly more sinned against than sinning. These aren't people getting their just dessets after letting their greed drive them to increasingly evil behavior, unless ditching someone at a gas station is inherently evil. Maybe there's something in Leviticus about that, I dunno. Hell, Peter Falk and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson are a couple of cabbies who just happened to pick up two fares and drive them a short distance away. Could ten or twenty years of "forgetting" to take a customer's umbrella out of the trunk with their luggage be responsible for that much bad karma?

It's a fatal misstep. Comedy is this: fire escape collapses, we hear it crash to the ground offscreen, crossfade to the movie's final scene in a prison hospital where they're all in body casts and groaning in pain. But when you show the viewers the peril, repeatedly underscore the peril, hammer home the peril further through the reactions of witnesses in the scene who think that this is all too horrible to watch, and then toss all of these semi-likeable characters into the meat grinder and ask everyone to laugh...that's not comedy. That's a reality-TV show on the Fox Network. And setting it all to merry-go-round music makes it creepier, not funnier.

I realize that Stanley Kramer and IA(4M)W's screenwriters are guilty of nothing worse than following the vogue of the time. Mean-spirited dark endings were par for the course in the field of Sixties comedies. I remember one in particular: "Cold Turkey," starring Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart, and Bob and Ray (which, incidentally, also had a "big-headed celebrities chasing something" poster). That one ended with the movie's best-intentioned protagonist -- a priest -- getting shot in the gut and dying in the street. Then the entire town he was trying to defend is transformed into a toxic industrial wasteland. That's right: leeeave 'em laughing. Allllways leave 'em laughing.

I didn't manage to see "Rat Race" so I hit MoviePooper.com, a site that caters to the cheapskates and the curious by revealing movie endings. It tells me that the movie's chase ends with all of the treasure-seekers finding themselves together on the stage at a rally for the homeless, and agreeing to give the millions to charity.

By the time we're celebrating "Rat Race"'s fortieth anniversary re-release, that ending will seem as much of a tedious artifact of its time as "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"'s. The difference is that I probably won't be walking out of the theater afterwards with a dark determination to go dig up its director and punch him in whatever's left of his guts.

Copyright ©2001 Andy Ihnatko. May not be redistributed without permission. Studio PR types wishing to send Andy tapes, promotional clothing, or high-end video gear in hopes of securing a positive review are advised that such efforts are futile, but they're free to try to determine how high Andy's price actually is. Mail any and all pelft to Box 279, Norwood, MA 02062. He already has a subwoofer for his home-theater but could probably use a good pair of casual slacks.