The second of two pictures that funnyman Tim
Conway made for a short-lived outfit called the International Picture Show
Company, this abysmal would-be farce tries to present Conway and Chuck McCann
as a bumbling comedy duo. The actors get the bumbling part right, but if either
of them actually does anything funny in the course of the picture’s painfully
stupid 95 minutes, it escaped my view. Sadly, Conway also penned the flick—one
of the only feature-length projects for which he took a solo writing credit—so
one fears They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way represents his best
guess at what makes people laugh. To say Conway was someone who benefitted when
collaborators raised his game is an understatement. The story concerns a pair
of idiot small-town cops (Conway and McCann) going undercover as convicts in
order to uncover corruption among prison officials, but mostly the script is a
vessel for delivering one sequence of physical comedy after another. Even from
the first scene, the gags in They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way
bludgeon the senses with their ineffectiveness. In the opening bit, Conway and
McCann sit in a patrol car, and Conway tries to start the car. The failure of
the engine to ignite is meant to be funny—during five repeated attempts.
And yet then, when a suspect drives by, Conway starts the car without any
difficulty, as if the previous five gags hadn’t happened. Unimaginably, it
gets worse. The bad guy (played by a valiant Dub Tayl0r) is named “Warden
Warden,” the lead characters prove incapable of using such simple devices as
potato peelers and tape dispensers without causing chaos, and the “high point”
of the picture involves an extended Carol Burnett Show-style sketch of
Conway’s character attempting to perform dentistry on the bad guy while
repeatedly injecting himself with Novocain. Oh, and the climax involves Conway
and McCann disguised as, respectively, a buck-toothed Japanese dignitary and
his geisha companion—because, apparently, the film’s various portrayals of
brainless rednecks weren’t sufficiently offensive.
They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way:
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