Starring: Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Spencer Tracy (and about 400 other famous people)
Rated: G
Released: 1963
What I “know”: This is one of my dad’s favorite movies. Like I told him a while ago I was going to see it and he started laughing. “Oh, man, it’s hilarious!” Then this weekend he told me he thinks I’ll like it now but might not have when I was younger, so he apparently thinks my sense of humor has matured … or gotten softer. One of the two.
What I know after reading the Netflix sleeve: “Before literally kicking the bucket when his car careens off an embankment, “Smiler” Grogan tells onlookers he’s stashed $350,000 beneath the big “W” in Santa Rosita — and thus begins a mad dash to recover said dough.”
Also, this movie is 2:41. WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE EDITORS? Why are all these movies pushing 3 hours????
TRAILER!
6:37: I’ve already had to rely on IMDB more than I would have thought to identify people. I guess I expected Milton Berle to look older than that, even in 1963. Can’t wait for Mr. Roper to show up!
7:45: “If you move me, I’ll break into little bits.” *Jimmy Durante proceeds to move all over telling his story*
9:10: MUAHAHAHA I was literally typing “There was no bucket. That description bugs me. Don’t say literally if he doesn’t literally kick a bucket” and then … he kicked a bucket. Tremendous.
10:23: Mr. Roper!
16:50: Buddy Hackett just randomly naming W words while Mickey Rooney yells at him kills me.
19:00: What was Jonathan Winters’ big plan? Just stop and wait two hours for them to leave so he could … get the money last? Like, was he going to U-turn his truck on that mountain and go the long way? I don’t understand his dastardly idea.
19:50: It must have been the craziness of the first shot, but Berle looks older now. And like himself. If I’d just waited, I’d have figured it out!
20:41: Holy crap, Spencer Tracy is like the opposite of Berle for me. I didn’t expect him to be super old. Then I looked him up and he died four years after this. I’m telling you, if you don’t know this about me, my relation to how time moves is not tremendous. Like … I don’t know when all his movies came out, but I guess I assumed like the ’50s. It was apparently the ’30s and ’40s.
21:32: Hahaahhaha Spencer Tracy threw his hat out the window and made the most ridiculous sound. “DIB BUH!” is my best approximation.
21:58: Holy crap, Jerry Lewis is in this? Uncredited?
27:36: The math on this 27 shares of the money version is hurting my head. No wonder they can’t agree.
28:14: Hackett: “Except you, lady! May you just drop dead!” Winters: “OK, we all agree on that.” Her face after that is tremendous.
31:39: Man, Berle’s wife wasn’t kidding. He is not a good driver.
32:20: Oh no! That poor couple that just got run off the road and lost all their shit. White dudes chasing big money cost a black couple half their belongings and nearly kill them … sounds allegorical.
37:54: You guys … I just literally made a sad sound at Jonathan Winters’ sad face when the Berle group went flying past him in another car. Poor guy got on a girls bike to try to get help and just got ditched.
41:54: OH NO, JONATHAN WINTERS. Oh gosh. I mean, I know this is in his wheelhouse, but I just feel so bad! He just told the whole story to a guy who stopped to help him, then the guy was like “Oh you should go move that bike” and as he threw it into a bush, the dude drives off to go get the money himself! Jonathan, I hope you never trusted another human as long as you lived. But you were fine to trust Mork. He wasn’t human.
42:43: MUAHAHAH HOLD ON. There’s a sign on the side of the road for Ray & Irwin Garage. My dad’s name is … Ray Erwin (though most people usually spell it with an I on first try). This is hilarious. This is probably part of why he loves this movie, though I’m also guessing he’s forgotten this part in the past 55 years.
49:12: Hey! It’s Thurston Howell III!
50:29: Holy cow, you guys. Jonathan Winters was a gift to the world. The part with him breaking free from the garage is just sheer perfection.
53:36: And then it kept going … and going … and going. I snorted, legit, four times during that three minutes. Tremendous, tremendous physical comedy.
54:16: This dude is AGGRESSIVELY dancing, and his female partner looks like she is pissed at everything.
56:36: Poor Jack Benny!!!
58:10: And I just sniggled at them holding Ethel Merman upside down, trying to shake the car keys out of her bosom. Well played.
1:00:06: Sid Caesar, man. This movie is just chock full of physical comedians, and I adore it.
1:09:13: Uh, how is he going to return the hitchhiker’s kid back to his family after finding the alternate route to the road?
1:28:59: This movie is ridiculous, in all the best ways. The good-for-nothing, aggressively dancing son is on his way to “help” his mom instead of going to get the money. Everyone’s fighting with everyone. This is great.
1:30:00: This “intermission” thing in movies is so crazy to me. I’m fast-forwarding past a black screen.
1:34:14: I hope Sid Caesar gets blown to bits for a.) setting up a dynamite blast to get out of this stupid basement; b.) lining the fuse 40000000 feet long; c.) doing so on a paper trail over top of some paper boxes and d.) doing it 6 inches from a load of fireworks.
1:39:49: Man, these cops sure do have a lot of information about people that they’re not near and before cell phones were invented. They know the one dude (who wasn’t even part of the original group) drove his car into a lake. They know the ones in the basement started a fire and set off fireworks and still didn’t get out (but apparently didn’t care enough to go save their lives).
1:59:48: I oddly enjoy that two groups arrived there at the same time. Don’t know why … totally implausible. Also, unrelated, but my allergies blew up in the last 45 minutes and now I can barely breathe and my eyes are watering. So if the end of this review is off, that’s why.
2:00:19: Hey, that’s Peter Falk that drove that cab!
2:02:15: I told my dad early in the movie that when Buddy Hackett was running through W words, I was like “I’m sure it’s actually a big W and not that it stands for something” and hey, I was right!
2:15:30: Nice reveal by Spencer Tracy. And Berle popping his nitroglycerine pills throughout the movie has cracked me up.
2:19:50: Muahahah Jonathan Winters’s double earned his pay for this movie.
2:29:38: Hey, that’s that guy from “Some Like It Hot” with the weird face! Joe E. Brown!
2:32:26: Hahah the fire truck ladder is swinging because they all clambered on at once. Not to say I wouldn’t have done the same … it still looks safer than that fire escape.
2:33:17: And the hardest laugh of the night comes from Sid Caesar being catapulted through a boarded-up window by the rogue ladder. Tremendous.
As I watched the last scene, I just wonder what Spencer Tracy was thinking when he made this movie. Like, it’s hilarious. No doubt. But if he was like “OK, so this is my life now, I make movies where Ethel Merman slipping on a banana peel is the capper to the whole flick,” I just wonder what that meant to him.
Tons of fun, hilarious, and a great cast. I could have put another 400 clips in this thing, but that would have been a nightmare. This movie gets two thumbs up.
Next up: “American History X”
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