Evil Roy Slade (1972)

          Something of a precursor to Mel Brooks’ classic comedy Blazing Saddles (1974), this made-for-TV farce lampoons Wild West clichés by delivering jokes at a blistering pace. Alas, while Evil Roy Slade has strong elements, notably a cheerfully manic leading performance by John Astin of The Addams Family fame, the movie’s lukewarm one-liners, tepid running gags, and weak satirical concepts pale next to the outrageous brilliance (or brilliant outrageousness) of Blazing Saddles. That said, if you adjust your expectations appropriately, then Evil Roy Slade will provide you with 90-something minutes of rootin’-tootin’ silliness. After all, the project was written and produced by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, whose other collaborations included transforming Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple into one of the most memorable sitcoms of the ’70s. Sure, most of the jokes in Evil Roy Slade are goofy (“Somethin’s on my mind and it hurts my head!”), but there’s something to be said for letting stone-cold comedy professionals take the wheel and going along for the ride.

          Astin plays Evil Roy Slade, who was abandoned as an infant and then grew into a hateful criminal whose only friends are vultures. (As in, actual carrion-eating birds.) When Roy meets the lovely but wholesome Betsy Potter (Pamela Austin), he tries to go straight, taking a job at a store until his old compulsions drive him to rob again. Meanwhile, businessman Nelson Stoll (Mickey Rooney), the owner of a Western Union-type telegraph service that has been robbed countless times by Roy’s gang, determines to take Roy out permanently. Nelson hires a vain singing cowboy, Marshal Bing Bell (Dick Shawn), for the job. The gags fly furiously, ranging from the amusing to the groan-worthy. Bing Bell wears little bell earrings. Roy contemplates changing his name, with options including “Evil John Smith” and the like. During a montage sequence, the words “Time Passes” are superimposed on the screen. Much is made of Nelson’s “stumpy index finger,” which he wore out sending telegraph messages. You get the idea.

          Notwithstanding an unfortunate trope of homophobia (such were the times), most of Evil Roy Slade is harmless nonsense. Astin excels at this sort of high-octane craziness, Rooney attacks his cartoonish characterization vigorously, Shawn commits to his ridiculous role, and they’re abetted by comedy stalwarts including Milton Berle, Dom DeLuise, and Henry Gibson. If nothing else, Evil Roy Slade is superior on every level to Astin’s other comic western, the 1973 theatrical feature The Brothers O’Toole.

Evil Roy Slade: FUNKY

Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)

          Representing not only a feeble attempt at absurdist humor but also a disastrous moment in the careers of two Hollywood luminaries, Get to Know Your Rabbit is such a misfire that it spent two years on the shelf at Warner Bros. before the studio finally arranged a half-hearted release. The picture was Brian De Palma’s first studio assignment, and his involvement ended when he was fired during principal photography. Similarly, the movie was TV funnyman Tom Smothers’ first and last starring role in a major movie. Written by Jordan Crittenden, Get to Know Your Rabbit tries for outlandish satire about the dehumanizing aspects of corporate culture. Marketing executive Donald (Smothers) quits his job the day terrorists explode a bomb at his office—a random event that neither makes sense nor adds anything to the story. Seeking a more fulfilling lifestyle, Donald studies with the eccentric Delasandro (Orson Welles) and becomes a tap-dancing magician. Then Donald goes on tour, enlisting his former boss, an alcoholic named Paul (John Astin), to serve as his manager. While Donald performs in seedy nightclubs across America and romances a young woman identified only as Terrific-Looking Girl (Katharine Ross), Paul creates a corporate empire called TDM—as in Tap Dancing Musicians.

          Yes, the supposedly high-larious central joke of the movie is that so many people hate their jobs, just like Donald did, that thousands of them happily quit the 9-to-5 world in order to become kitschy entertainers. The tone of the movie is as much of a mess as the story. Characters who should seem eccentric instead come across as insane, jokes fall flat in nearly every scene, and the hyperactive music score tries to pump life into unresponsive footage. As for the would-be wacky dialogue? Consider this exchange between Donald and a floozy named Susan (Samantha Jones). Donald: “I don’t know exactly how to ask you this, but how long have you been a cheap broad?” Susan: “Oh, it’s an off and on thing.” De Palma’s signature overhead shots, split-screen gimmicks, and topless scenes merely add to the overall confusion, and Smothers’ performance runs the short gamut from nasty to nonexistent. Meanwhile, costars Astin, Allen Garfield, and Ross play their roles well, though each seems to exist in a different movie than the rest of the cast. Some cinematic train wrecks are fascinating, but Get to Know Your Rabbit is not one of them.

Get to Know Your Rabbit: LAME

Wacky Taxi (1972)

Perhaps because the history of screen comedy is filled with hyphenates, from Charlie Chaplin to Jerry Lewis to Ben Stiller, myriad successful comic actors have felt compelled to attempt writing, producing, and/or directing. The results of these experiments are often grisly. For instance, funnyman John Astin (of The Addams Family fame) more than exceeded the limits of his artistry by co-directing, with Alexander Grasshoff, this harmless but poorly made and profoundly unfunny flick about a fed-up factory worker who quits his job to become an independent cab driver. Made on a meager budget and saddled with a no-name supporting cast, the picture gets off to a wobbly start and never recovers. The opening scene introduces Astin, who is not Latino, as Pepper, a Mexican-American patriarch living in San Diego. Before the audience is given any explanation of the character, Pepper walks off the assembly line and buys a car, which he paints with taxi markings, and then starts looking for fares. A good 20 minutes of screen time elapse before Pepper’s brother-in-law, an attorney named Jaimie (Ralph James), explains that Pepper needs a hack license and insurance to operate legally. How are viewers supposed to root for a character who is so oblivious and reckless, especially since he’s the breadwinner for a family that includes a wife and five children? Had any of the scenes featuring Pepper’s cab-driving misadventures been amusing, the story flaws might have been easier to overlook. Unfortunately, each such scene is less imaginative than the preceding—Pepper gets lost driving to an airport, the cab suffers engine failure, a mystery lady uses the cab for some unknown crime that might be prostitution or smuggling. (The editing is so choppy that significant facts get lost in the shuffle.) Although Astin has a few charming moments, mostly when he’s making caustic asides about misfortune, the overall flow of the movie is so drab, erratic, and repetitive that mining for gold in the lead performance becomes a chore.

Wacky Taxi: LAME

The Brothers O’Toole (1973)

          Near as I can tell, TV funnyman John Astin—best known as debonair but insane Gomez Addams on the ’60s sitcom The Addams Family—only received top billing in two theatrical features, including this bland comic Western and 1972’s Wacky Taxi. (He also starred in another comic Western, 1972’s Evil Roy Slade, but that project was actually made for television.) With his enjoyable slow-burn tantrums and his nimble way of delivering complex dialogue, Astin is by far the best thing about The Brothers O’Toole, which is bogged down by mechanical plotting, substandard production values, and vapid supporting performances. Representing a convergence of clichés, the plot begins when con man Michael O’Toole (Astin) finds himself lost in the desert after a scheme goes wrong. Eventually, Michael tracks down his idiot brother, Timothy O’Toole (Steve Carlson), before entering the frontier town of Molybdenum, Colorado. (As an example of how far the movie reaches for jokes, several flaccid attempts are made to wring humor from the mispronunciation of the town’s name as “Molly Be Damned.”) Michael gets thrown in jail after being mistaken by local authorities for a criminal named Desperate Ambrose. Timothy, wrongly assuming the incarceration is part of a scam Michael is running on the locals, “plays along” while getting into mischief of his own.

          All of this becomes very tedious, with a love story, a subplot about the discovery of gold, and the supposedly hi-larious antics of small-town kooks thrown in to spruce up the storyline. In the same way that Michael is kept behind bars for most of the movie, the filmmakers restrain their strongest asset, leading man Astin. He’s charming and funny and smart whenever the filmmakers remember to utilize him, but the movie loses all its energy whenever he’s off screen. At the picture’s nadir, Timothy enters the town’s “Spitting, Belching and Cussin’ Contest,” which should be an outrageous highlight but instead merely comprises a limp montage of people expectorating. The only redeeming element of this dull sequence is a speech that Michael delivers afterward, reprimanding the crass people of Molybdenum: He describes the town as “a festering pustule on the face of the Western slope.” One of only two features directed by veteran character actor Richard Erdman, The Brothers O’Toole is amateurish on nearly every level, and the cast is peppered with B-listers who deliver perfunctory work. (For instance, onetime Miss America Lee Meriwether has a dreary extended cameo as Desperate Ambrose’s girlfriend.) Still, Astin fans will find much to enjoy in his performance, since Michael O’Toole exists outside the campy realm the actor usually occupies.

The Brothers O’Toole: FUNKY

Bunny O’Hare (1971)

          The fine folks at Wikipedia report that Bette Davis sued the producers of this offbeat comedy because editing changes transformed what Davis had been promised would be grown-up satire into silly slapstick. And while it’s heartening to see that Davis was still her usual combative self even well into the twilight of her career, the question underlying this factoid is why Davis—or anyone, for that matter—could ever have envisioned Bunny O’Hare as grown-up fare, satirical or otherwise. A juvenile predicated on coincidence and contrivance, the film is marred by pervasively nonsensical plotting. The opening scene tells the tale. Bunny O’Hare (Davis) is a dippy widow who flies into a panic when workers show up to demolish her home after she’s defaulted on bank payments. She inexplicably asks a workman named Bill (Ernest Borgnine) to protect her house even though he’s just there to salvage plumbing items for resale. Then Bunny phones her adult children for help, but the kids are too self-involved to recognize that Mom’s in a jam. Next, after Bill fails to protect Bunny’s house (which wasn’t his responsibility in the first place), he succumbs to guilt and offers Bunny a ride. Huh? A series of unlikely situations ensues, during which Bunny discovers that Bill is actually a bank robber wanted by the police, so Bunny blackmails Bill into helping her rob the financial institution that she feels treated her shabbily.

          Bunny O’Hare is a deeply confused movie. For instance, the filmmakers can’t decide if Bunny is competent or helpless. Nor can they decide if the antagonist is a bank, the cops, or Bunny’s children. Yet the myriad story problems aren’t the worst aspects of this dreadful movie. The central visual gimmick involves Borgnine and Davis masquerading as hippies, so viewers are subjected to the surreal sight of bearish Borgnine and tiny Davis decked out in Day-Glo polyester while they hurtle down city streets on a motorcycle. Proving that Davis was at least correct to complain about the film’s editing, the flick is cut and scored with the frenetic, broad-as-a-barn storytelling style of a Jerry Lewis movie. Plus, many getaway scenes feature out-of-place banjo music, as if the picture aspires to be a cousin to Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Davis strives to retain her dignity and plays certain scenes well, but her crisp line deliveries clash badly with Borgnine’s boisterous energy. Costar Jack Cassidy, as the vain cop obsessed with catching the “hippie bandits,” delivers a tiresome caricature in lieu of a performance, while funnyman John Astin, playing one of Bunny’s kids, fares slightly better.

Bunny O’Hare: LAME

Freaky Friday (1976)

          Among Walt Disney Productions’ most memorable live-action offerings of the ’70s, thanks to a novel concept and the presence of Jodie Foster in the leading role, Freaky Friday had a different genesis than the studio’s usual fare. Rather than being generated by in-house creatives, the movie was based on a novel by Mary Rodgers (the daughter of legendary composer Richard Rodgers), who also wrote the script. So, even though Freaky Friday follows the basic Disney paradigm of delivering a wholesome message through effects-driven comedy, it’s got a personal point of view.

          That’s not to say, unfortunately, that the movie is particularly good, since the characters are trite and the comedy never really connects. Freaky Friday zips along nicely enough, and the performances are sufficiently enthusiastic, but the movie’s entertainment value falls somewhere between forgettable and tiresome. The simple story begins when tomboyish, underachieving 13-year-old Annabel (Foster) and her uptight housewife mom, Ellen (Barbara Harris) simultaneously wish they could trade places with each other. By some unexplained magic, the women’s souls transpose, so Annabel’s mind ends up inside her mother’s body, and vice versa.

          At first, each is thrilled because of assumptions that the other lives a carefree existence, but then, as they will, high jinks ensue. Living inside an adult body but unaware how to deal with adult responsibilities, Annabel screws up chores like cooking and laundry. Meanwhile, Ellen can’t figure out how to make her teenaged body perform Annabel’s routine of schoolyard field hockey and extracurricular water-skiing. Ellen’s husband (John Astin) gets caught in the middle of the chaos, even as he’s trying to organize the splashy launch for a new real-estate development. It’s all quite harmless, with Annabel realizing what her mom juggles every day while Ellen learns that a lack of encouragement is keeping Annabel from fulfilling her potential.

          However, the mild charms of the leading performances—Foster displays her famously precocious gravitas, while Harris works a groove of likeable silliness—get drowned out by elaborate sight gags, particularly during the laborious chase scene that climaxes the movie. Nonetheless, Freaky Friday was a decent-sized hit that earned three Golden Globe nominations. It also got the remake treatment a generation later. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as mother and daughter, the 2003 version is infinitely superior to the original, opting for sweetly character-driven comedy instead of noisy slapstick.

Freaky Friday: FUNKY