Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Fun
I’m sorry, but too much is perfect.
The 1963 Stanley Kramer movie, It’s A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World, is too much. It’s perfect.
It’s too long – 3.3 hours in its restored form. The cast is way too big. The story is way too silly. The title is too long. (It started the trend toward obscenely long movie titles like A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, etc. Okay, those started out as Broadway hits first.).
Too many cars were junked. Too many stars were exhausted and injured. It was too hyped, even by today’s standards. The widescreen format made people sick by making any seat in the house a front row seat. Ethel Merman screams too much. Jonathan Winters had just been released from various mental institutions. Spencer Tracy was between way too many binges and was way too fragile.
The movie has always gotten good but mixed reviews. There is always a person out there who says, “Why is the pilot drinking an Old Fashioned instead of flying the Cessna? I don’t get it.”
These people are impervious to slapstick or silly comedy, just because they are. They’re the ones who design spreadsheets for fun. They’re the ones who say, “Why is Moe so hostile?”
The story is about greed. A bunch of strangers gathers at Jimmy Durante’s crash site. Jimmy’s character’s last words indicate a fortune buried under a “W” formation of palm trees nearby.
Then the race is on, as everybody tries to beat everybody else to the fortune, if they can find it.
The chase calls for nearly 4 hours of mostly slapstick comedy. Breathless slapstick. Loud slapstick. 85 stars in the cast, counting cameo appearances like Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, and The Three Stooges.
The movie went over budget. The shooting schedule fell hopelessly behind. Cutting and editing was brutal; the movie could well have gone over 7 hours long. When an attempt was made to find cut material in the early 2000’s, bulldozing a Pennsylvania landfill where the footage had been dumped 40 years earlier was considered.
In all, a good time was had.
Well, not all had a good time.
The biggest gripe was that Stanley Kramer ran cast and crew the way the Edmund Fitzgerald had been overdriven on the Great Lakes.
Gripe number one had to be the heat for the early desert scenes. And the mountain that 40-50-60-70 year old actors had to run up and down repeatedly in that desert heat. And the dangerous explosions and flying and automotive stunts all the cast were subjected to. At some point, Jonathan Winters was duct taped to a chair and forgotten. They found him hours later, after he’d nearly chewed himself free.
An Ethel Merman shot at Winters with her loaded handbag caught Winters in the mouth. Merman cried a sincere apology. Winters joked, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you in your room tonight.”
Barrie Chase, the dancer in the photo above Caesar and Berle, is the sole cast member alive today. She’s 92 or 93, spry and sharp.
“I padded my bra,” she told author of the book COMEDY IS A GRIM BUSINESS, James Curtis. She was considered the greatest female dancer of the 1950’s and ’60’s and had just come off a series of award-winning TV specials with Fred Astaire. “I usually don’t do that. When I walked on set, a crewman said, ‘Look at those knockers’. I nearly pulled the pads out and threw them at him.”
I wish they’d found a role for Jerry Colonna, who was mentioned for the cast early on.
The Cuban Missile Crisis put a damper on the shooting in 1962. And the assassination of JFK in 1963 definitely took a big bite out of box office returns.
I first saw MAD on TV when I was recovering from food poisoning in 1973 or 1974. It helped.
How could it not? Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Dorothy Provine, Jim Backus, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, The Three Stooges.
Laughter, the best medicine.
