{"id":563,"date":"2008-04-30T17:41:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-30T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=563"},"modified":"2012-04-15T23:38:40","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T03:38:40","slug":"slapstick-of-another-kind-1982-steven-paul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/563","title":{"rendered":"Slapstick of Another Kind (1982, Steven Paul)"},"content":{"rendered":"

1982: the year of Blade Runner<\/em>, White Dog<\/em>, Poltergeist<\/em>, The Thing<\/a><\/em>, Gandhi<\/em>, Britannia Hospital<\/a><\/em>, Fitzcarraldo<\/a><\/em>, Fanny & Alexander<\/em>, Tron<\/em>, the Sting version of Brimstone & Treacle<\/em>… and this, the legendary Worst Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation Ever. From young hotshot Steven Paul, one of the producers of Doomsday<\/a><\/em>, and I know I just said I wouldn’t waste my time watching anything created by anyone involved with Doomsday<\/em>, but the Vonnegut connection combined with this movie’s reputation for being one of the worst comedies of the 80’s forced me to watch it out of morbid curiosity.<\/p>\n

Laurel and Hardy? The book was dedicated to them.<\/em>
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Opens with narration by Orson Welles, surely giving even less effort than he did as the voice of the planet in Transformers: The Movie<\/em>. You can immediately tell that the movie has no comic sense whatsoever. It looks cheap despite the big-name cast, and every “joke” is dead on delivery. The comedy is mostly people falling down, moving fast, talking funny (slapstick, I guess) and it’s badly staged… for instance, the twins are giant-sized, but only when convenient.<\/p>\n

I don’t think Vonnegut was as mean-spirited towards the Chinese. And of course, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita is not of Chinese descent, but better him than Mickey Rooney I suppose. He plays the shrunken thumb-sized ambassador, a reference only understood by readers of the book since it’s unexplained during the movie. Other bits from the book are also rethought and bungled, and the twins are from SPACE now (and return to space in the ridiculous ending). All traces of Vonnegut’s trademark sadness and humanity are lost, unless you consider the sadness of the cast and the releasing studio and the audience. Rogue Cinema points out that the movie’s cast (Khan, Feldman, even Welles) and poster and title (and renaming the doctor “Frankenstein”) aimed to make audiences think that this would be a Mel Brooks Close Encounters<\/a><\/em> parody. That particular advertising lie is probably the most well-thought-out part of the whole film.<\/p>\n

Lewis!<\/em>
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Khan!<\/em>
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Madeline Khan and Jerry Lewis double-star as both the super-genius twins and their rich, detached parents. Marty Feldman is the butler in the twins’ secluded home. John Abbott plays a guy with a cool beard and Samuel FULLER is the colonel at the Military School For Screwed-Up Boys.<\/p>\n

Feldman!<\/em>
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Fuller!<\/em>
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One of the last films of Jim Backus (Mr. Howell on Gilligan’s Island<\/em>, voice of Mr. Magoo), John Abbott, Marty Feldman, and even Jerry Lewis (had starring roles in 6-7 more movies, most of them bad) but Jerry recovered in time to make Arizona Dream<\/em>. Yes, Slapstick<\/em> was a mega-career-killer, destroying the respectability of everyone involved! It ruined cinematographer Anthony Richmond, who previously shot the beautiful Man Who Fell To Earth<\/a><\/em> and Bad Timing<\/em> but went on to shoot Dane Cook movies and Dumb & Dumber 2<\/em>. And – little known fact – it contributed to the death of Orson Welles and was directly responsible for his never completing Big Brass Ring<\/em>, The Dreamers<\/a><\/em> or Other Side of the Wind<\/em>. Orson’s female co-narrator’s career was so thoroughly demolished that the internet has no record of who she was. But on the bright side, the movie helped launch the film career of Pat Morita, who would star in The Karate Kid<\/em> two years later.<\/p>\n

Morita! (he’s the one not looking at the camera)<\/em>
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Music by Michel Legrand and a song with lyrics by Vonnegut were edited out of the movie after the original release – why?? Assistant-directed by Michel’s son Benjamin Legrand, ending his short career as assistant-director (begun the year before on Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n

Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads? The incest scene doesn’t go very far, because we need a “PG” rating.<\/em>
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Released around the same time as Scorsese’s awesome King of Comedy<\/em>, also with Jerry Lewis, though I think this was shot first and shelved for a while. Gene Siskel calls it “shockingly bad” and Ebert calls it offensive but makes a point of not blaming Vonnegut or Lewis. I heard one detectable Jerry joke: “You know, do as the romans do… when in rome, that is – I had it backwards” (it’s all in the delivery). There’s an occasional passionate line-read by Madeline or Jerry, the occasional animated bit of action, but mostly the movie moves mechanically from one laborious scene to the next, a simple motion illustration of a screenplay written by a guy who knows a guy who talked to a guy who once read the Vonnegut novel (which wasn’t one of KV’s best stories to begin with). I would looove to say that Fuller, Lewis and Feldman were excellent and the movie was slightly worth watching, but they weren’t and it wasn’t. I’m not in any hurry to rewatch Breakfast of Champions<\/em> to decide whether this one is worse, but I think it probably is.<\/p>\n

Close Encounters of the Dumb Kind:<\/em>
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1982: the year of Blade Runner, White Dog, Poltergeist, The Thing, Gandhi, Britannia Hospital, Fitzcarraldo, Fanny & Alexander, Tron, the Sting version of Brimstone & Treacle… and this, the legendary Worst Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation Ever. From young hotshot Steven Paul, one of the producers of Doomsday, and I know I just said I wouldn’t waste […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,169,200,293,196,365,364,112,350],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-awful","tag-china","tag-frankenstein","tag-jerry-lewis","tag-kurt-vonnegut","tag-laurel-hardy","tag-samuel-fuller","tag-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7578,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/7578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}