Okay, Mad World. When I first saw this movie, they'd just shot the president — like the day before. My folks and I were at the Pacific Cinerama Dome, the same place Carolyn and I saw it Sunday evening — she for the second or third time, me for the two-thousandth or three-thousandth. I had to watch it over and over to work on the commentary track of the forthcoming Blu-ray/DVD set for Criterion and you'd think I'd be sick of it by now. Nope. The film is so rich that I always notice something new…and it was real nice to see it with a real audience. By "real," I mean people who appreciate it and don't hesitate to laugh out loud at it. And by "audience," I mean not at home alone in your den on a big Samsung.
The Dome was crawling all day with Mad World lovers. There were exhibits and artwork and props, and there was a little media event where Karen Kramer and three stars from the film (Marvin Kaplan, Barrie Chase and the invincible Mickey Rooney) arrived in speeding (sorta) police cars. Karen was, of course, the wife of the film's producer-director, the late Stanley Kramer. We got there a bit late for those festivities but early enough to grab a meal and say howdy to Marvin before the show started. What a delightful, funny man.
As mentioned, it started with 41 minutes of maybe the least coherent Q-and-A I've ever seen. This was not the fault of the moderator, Jeff Garlin (Hi, Jeff!) who handled a difficult situation with great humor. Mr. Kaplan couldn't hear and Mr. Rooney couldn't listen…and Mickey just kept talking and talking, especially when a question was directed to Barrie Chase. Rooney snagged those and responded, as he generally does, with unrelated replies. Want to see what it was like? Here's a video someone shot of the panel and of the back of my head…
It's 42 minutes so I don't expect you to watch the whole thing…but maybe you'll watch enough to get a sense of how awkward it was. Do not believe Mr. Rooney's claims that the entirety of It's a Mad (4) World was ad-libbed. They had a script that was approximately the height of Mickey and they largely stuck to it. I also don't believe Boys Town was made in two weeks, either. Mr. Rooney is a giant — no height joke intended — in the world of motion pictures with a splendid body of work. But his rambling, disconnected, fact-free public appearances have passed in my mind from amusingly eccentric to just plain sad.
Finally, they got to the feature. I know there are people who don't like Mad World and I'm okay with that. I just figure there are plenty of movies those folks love that I don't. Those people probably all eat cole slaw, too. Mad World is a celebration of a kind of character actor and comedian that is sadly extinct. Nothing against newer comedians. I love plenty of them, as well. In the Q-and-A, Jeff Garlin said that few of today's comics would be worthy of a film like this. Maybe, maybe not. The main obstacle to Mad World 2014 is probably that too many of today's top comedians wouldn't set foot on a film set for under $15 million. You can't make a gang comedy when you can't afford a gang.
I'm amazed at the number of folks I've encountered who just don't "get" this movie. Either they take it too literally or they don't understand what is a pretty simple story. Last year, a gentleman named Wheeler Winston Dixon, who is apparently a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote this article describing it as "…a literally mind-numbing orgy of violence and destruction, as gas stations, supermarkets, cars, planes, and anything else in sight is destroyed with ritualistic, almost sadistic fetishism."
When I read that, I thought, "Did he see the same movie I've seen so many times? Did it literally numb his mind?" And then I got my answer as I read further and found…
…as many critics remarked at the time, the sheer wastage of the film is appalling. During one sequence in a supermarket, literally thousands of cans of food are split open and ruined, food that would be fit for any pantry shelf, and all that motivates the film's central characters is greed, anger, lust and avarice.
There is no sequence in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World set in a supermarket. None. In fact, unless you count product placement for Coca-Cola, one banana and Jim Backus drinking Old-Fashioneds and Bloody Marys, I can't think of a single trace of food in the entire movie. I wonder what Professor Dixon would make of a student who handed in a report with that kind of glaring error in it. Probably the same thing I think when I read other things he wrote about it like this —
Humiliation, pain, violence, cruelty; is this really the stuff of comedy? Yet the colossal perversity of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World remains a monument to over indulgence; "give me more, more, more," the film seems to say — which is just what its protagonists want, as well.
So I find myself wondering if he paid a whole lot of attention to the film. Or for that matter, to movie comedy, which usually displays fair amounts of humiliation, pain, violence and cruelty. Elsewhere in his piece, he lavishes praise on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and doesn't seem deterred by humiliation, pain, violence or cruelty in a film that ends in nuclear holocaust. Instead, he calls it a "canonical classic," which of course it is. I won't attempt to compare Strangelove to Mad World (love 'em both) but I don't know how you can't get that the slapstick of the latter is not to be taken any more literally than the inhumanity in the former. They're both cartoons, Prof.
I also find it generally pointless to defend humor. If you don't laugh, you don't laugh…and no work of entertainment can be expected to amuse everyone. I do sometimes see the point in defending comedy against folks who want to spoil things for others because they didn't find them funny.
Watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World last night, I laughed and just, in general, enjoyed watching those wonderful clowns show off their skills. If you take it too seriously, you're doing it all wrong. I even disagree with those who read too much of a message into the picture. There is one but it's about as thick as microwave bacon: People are at their worst when they're at their greediest. Stanley Kramer didn't take 3+ hours to convey that revelatory insight to us. He was too busy making a comedy and we may need to send someone to the Film Studies Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to explain this to them.
I'm thinking it would have to be someone who really understands this film and who can explain it to them in a more coherent, accurate manner than Professor Dixon. How's about we get up a collection and send Mickey Rooney?