I mentioned here that with the passing of actor Nicholas Georgiade, Barrie Chase becomes the last surviving cast member of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World who had a speaking part. A couple of folks wrote me to say that Ms. Chase did not have any lines in the picture and they're just plain wrong…and probably unaware how many times I've seen my favorite movie. She answers a phone call in Dick Shawn's "pad" when Ethel Merman calls and passes the phone over to Shawn.
Another reader who apparently has never heard of things like Google and The Internet Movie Database wrote to ask me what else she'd done. Barrie Chase had a very long career as both an actress and a dancer. On TV, she gained much attention as Fred Astaire's dance partner in several acclaimed specials.
She was in dozens of movies. The picture of her above is from a memorable bit part in the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye film, White Christmas. She had a pretty large role in Cape Fear with Gregory Peck, which was in release at the time Mad World was being filmed. In fact, near the end of Mad World when the two cabs full o' comedians are chasing Spencer Tracy's car through the streets of Long Beach, they pass the State Theater and Cape Fear is on the marquee. You need to look real fast to see it but it's there.
Finally, a reader named "Brian12" asks, "Do you know if there is any significance to the character name "Mrs. Halliburton?" That's what her character is named in Mad World and he asks if she and Sylvester Marcus (Dick Shawn's character) are married. No, they're not.
Script material that never made it into the film tells us that Mrs. Halliburton is the wife of an undertaker named Calvin Halliburton. It is inferred that she is at Sylvester's place because she is cheating on her hubby, who is never seen. When Sylvester gets the call from his momma and decides to rush to her aid, he leaps (literally) into the convertible that Mrs. Halliburton drove to his pad and races off in it.
That scene where Sylvester drives off in her husband's car and she screams for him to come back was in the original version of the movie when it was first released but it went away when the film was trimmed down a few weeks later. It is now "lost" but in the highly-recommended Criterion DVD (or Blu-ray) edition of the movie, there are two versions of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — the general release version and a reconstruction of most (not all) of the original release version.
The brief car-stealing scene is represented in the reconstruction by the audio track heard over some production stills of the scene. And if you're listening to the commentary track — as you should — the voice you'll hear describing the scene is mine. Listen to the whole thing and you'll also learn an awful lot more about this movie. Experts Mike Schlesinger and Paul Scrabo join me on the commentary track.
