I have a couple of folks who send me e-mails and sign them "Smiler Grogan," which was the name of Jimmy Durante's character in my fave film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There are at least two, maybe three, and one of them wrote to ask me…
I've heard you in interviews say that when you got into the TV business, you tried to work with or at least meet everyone you could who was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Could you furnish us with a list of who you met? And how many of them told you that they were very proud to have been in the movie?
In the immortal words of Curly Howard, "Soitenly!" Here's a list of everyone in the film who wasn't a stunt person or extra. I have boldfaced the names of those who I worked with and/or got to spend a decent amount of time with and I have italicized the names of those I met in what I would consider brief encounters…
Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Jim Backus, Ben Blue, Joe E. Brown, Alan Carney, Chick Chandler, Barrie Chase, Lloyd Corrigan, William Demarest, Andy Devine, Selma Diamond, Peter Falk, Norman Fell, Paul Ford, Stan Freberg, Louise Glenn, Leo Gorcey, Sterling Holloway, Marvin Kaplan, Edward Everett Horton, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Charles Lane, Mike Mazurki, Charles McGraw, Zasu Pitts, Carl Reiner, Madlyn Rhue, Roy Roberts, Arnold Stang, Nick Stewart, Sammee Tong, Jesse White, Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny, Stanley Clements, Joe DeRita, Larry Fine, Moe Howard, Nicholas Georgiade, Stacy Harris, Tom Kennedy, Ben Lessy, Bobo Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Eddie Rosson, Eddie Ryder, Jean Sewell, Doodles Weaver and Lennie Weinrib.
Of those I met, the only two who ever expressed negative feelings about the film were Mickey Rooney and Carl Reiner, both of whom seemed to feel that the film was loud and crowded and not as funny as it could or should have been. Mr. Rooney made some great films in his career but he was not, shall we say, the most stable human being, always announcing wacky business ventures and show business productions that never materialized. His appearances at Mad World revival screenings were punctuated with all sorts of strange anecdotes that never happened including the ridiculous assertion that he and his co-stars had ad-libbed the entire script. A copy of the entire script — yes, of course, I have one — shows that this was not so.
I never found much logic in anything Rooney said about the movie and the one time I got to speak with him about it, he was somewhat incoherent and he wound up screaming and running out of the room about another matter. Mr. Reiner, I think, was imagining what he, as a writer-director, might have done with the cast and budget that Stanley Kramer had. It would have been a very different film and I'm not saying it would have been a bad one.
Both of those gentlemen somewhat recanted late in their lives, saying only good things about the picture. I suspect this was because they kept being invited to screenings full of fans who pledged undying allegiance to the movie. This is just a theory on my part but I think they came to realize they'd been a part — in Rooney's case, a rather large part — of something that meant so much to so many and they decided to stop being negative about the experience.
They may also have noticed that some of their co-stars — folks they truly respected like Jonathan Winters and Don Knotts, to name but two — were bursting with delight to have been part of the film. So to demean the film was to demean Jonathan's or Don's gratification and pride. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion but they're also entitled to change their minds.
