BEFORE: In setting up the actor linking to make these chains, I sometimes had to observe the "except for one" rule - meaning that several times already this year, I was able to put all of the Bruce Willis films on the list together, except for one. I had all the Kevin Spacey films together, except for one that was in the Robin Williams chain. As someone with mild OCD this should drive me crazy, but I've come to accept it because it helps link everything together better if I look at the big picture - there will be fewer gaps if I can accept this. So tonight is the last Peter Falk film as he carries over from "Wings of Desire" - except for one, which will be part of the last boxing chain.
Similarly, the best I could do, in order to get a working link on the other side of this Jack Lemmon chain, was to put 5 Lemmon films together (all except for one), then a film without Jack, then the last one. So the next week of films will be "mostly Jack Lemmon".
THE PLOT: Comedy about an early 20th century car race across three continents.
AFTER: This one plays out like a low-rent version of "Around the World in 80 Days", although by comparing it to that film, I think I'm giving it too much credit. Everyone is so over-the-top here that it plays out much like a live-action cartoon. It probably inspired that "Wacky Races" cartoon that was on in the 1970's, and quite often the physics of auto racing seem to be drawn directly from Road Runner shorts. For the last couple of years, TCM has played this during its "30 Days of Oscar" marathon - perhaps because it fills up over two 1/2 hours of programming - and I passed on it a couple of times, picking it up this February to round out the Jack Lemmon films I picked up during their Neil Simon tribute.
But damn, if I can't even bring myself to watch the Kentucky Derby, the "most exciting two minutes in sports", even when there's a potential Triple Crown winner, what leads me to believe that a two 1/2 hour phony car race will hold my attention? Simple answer - it won't. This is much, much longer than it needed to be, and it might have worked if they'd cut out some of the bloat, but they didn't. For two teams that are trying to get somewhere quickly, they sure spend a lot of time dicking around at various stops, especially in eastern Europe, where they seem to stop for a few weeks' time.
You see, Lemmon's villain, Professor Fate, turns out to be an exact double for a Crown Prince (Lemmon plays a dual role, "Prince and the Pauper"-style) and this makes him valuable to the forces that are trying to overthrow the government in Pottsdorf. But if only they'd kept racing and not stopped, they never would have known... The details of what slow them down are somewhat important, but it bothers me that they get bogged down at all - did the writer even know what a race is?
Worse, their time in Pottsdorf leads to a traditional swordfight and a clichéd pie fight. Whatever appreciation for slapstick that I regained by watching the Marx Brothers films a couple months ago has now been ruined by this cheezy cream-pie splatfest that had no purpose or resolution. It was all just "look how messy we can get" without any gags, except for "let's see how long we can keep Tony Curtis' white outfit clean, before he gets hit with a pie". Hilarious? Hardly - though the sight of Natalie Wood covered in whipped cream has probably been the inspiration for a few fetish web-sites.
Finally, they all remember that a race is going on and they high-tail it to Paris, but even then the sprint to the finish line gets all bogged down in sexual politics, as Wood's character argues with Curtis' character about the emancipation of women. It's a wonder anything got done in the 1910's if everyone was arguing all the time about which gender is more capable. I guess that people in the 1960's were naturally nostalgic for the early 1900's, but I'm hard-pressed to understand why.
NITPICK POINT: In a race to Paris where cars leave New York and head to Chicago, why on earth would they travel north to Albany? They know that to get to Chicago, you've got to drive west, right? For that matter, who planned this damn route in the first place? I mean, it's better that they travel west to Alaska rather than try to drive over the Atlantic Ocean, but what was their original plan to get from Alaska to Russia? Were they supposed to take a ferry or something? They got there through rather comic means, but I'd still like to see the directions.
NITPICK POINT #2: I realize this is a comedy, and not meant to be taken seriously, but that's not how homing pigeons work. They're trained to run on specific routes, and you can't just take a pigeon out to some place it's never been, like way out West, and expect it to make it back to New York if it's never travelled that way before.
NITPICK POINT #3: The band music that they used (over and over again, ugh) at nearly every crowd scene, and at the beginning and end of the race, sounded like a pastiche of several notable songs, like "Hail to the Chief", "Dixie", and "America the Beautiful" - but it's quite obvious that it was the same three minutes of music, looped over and over, at every stop. This is laziness of the highest order, not only repeating the music, but borrowing from so many other songs, and whatever Henry Mancini got paid to compose this, it was too much.
Also starring Jack Lemmon (last seen in "Mister Roberts"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "The Defiant Ones"), Natalie Wood (last seen in "This Property Is Condemned"), Keenan Wynn, Arthur O'Connell, Vivian Vance, Ross Martin, Larry Storch (last seen in "Sex and the Single Girl"), Dorothy Provine, Marvin Kaplan, Denver Pyle.
RATING: 3 out of 10 smoke-screens
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