Category: Carl Reiner

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING. THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING.

By Marc S. Sanders

Farce works best when the serious explodes into the outrageously absurd.  When Jonathan Winters is a lawman who insists to Brian Keith “We gotta do something! I mean we really gotta do something!” you should know that whatever needs to be done has got to be out of unreasonable paranoia.   Yet, the desperation and nonsensical fear is something you can empathize with because if I were told the states were being invaded, I’d surely think twice as I reach for the tennis racket in the back of my closet to use as a weapon.

Norman Jewison set aside his penchant for intense drama, socially reflected in films like In The Heat Of The Night, to direct a madcap satire imagined from the very real threats of The Cold War of the 1960s.  At a time when submarines were being used for silent spying and espionage, a Russian sub gets stuck on a sand dune within the shallow ocean waters just beyond the New England town of Gloucester.

Alan Arkin as Rozanov leads a squad expedition off the vessel and intrudes upon the vacation home of Walt and Elspeth Whitaker (Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint).  With a pistol pointing at the family of four, all that is really needed is a boat to nudge the helpless submarine back into the water.  Yet, as word spreads of who has arrived, that’s not what the townsfolk will have you believe.

Before the age of the internet, hysteria still managed to catch fire with word of mouth.  Reader, perhaps you heard of what happened when Orson Welles aired his radio show of H.G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds.  Yes!  Apparently, an alien invasion was really happening.  What amuses me about Jewison’s film is that only a very few people even get an opportunity to see the Russians in person.  Still, the fear overcomes everyone in town.  The battle crazed old codger named Fendall (Paul Ford) dons his sword, and because he carries said sword, he seems most fitting to lead the charged brigade.  

The Russians Are Coming. The Russians Are Coming. works like a pre-cursor picture to what the team of ZAZ would later do with Airplane! and The Naked Gun.  The town switch board gets overrun.  The men take hold of their rifles, but stop at the bar for a belt first. Two of the wives board a motorcycle with a side cab waving a poster that says “Alert” in front of their faces so they can’t see where they’re going.  What’s anyone supposed to gather from saying “Alert,” anyway?  It’s ridiculous, but the palpable tension of these fine folks is convincing when they come alive on this sleepy Sunday morning off the northeast coastline.

As comedic as Jonathan Winters always was, he takes it seriously as a deputy who does his best to lead while wearing his badge.  Brian Keith is great at just being Brian Keith, the grump who tries to keep things in perspective but can’t because everyone else is ready to take up arms.  Carl Reiner doesn’t have to do anything but occupy the screen and he’s funny.  He’s the antsy father to an eleven-year-old boy who he chooses not to believe.  In all seriousness, are we ever to take Carl Reiner seriously when he tries to offer a sound explanation for the Ruskies’ arrival?

Alan Arkin is just lovably speaking fluent Russian at times while trying to navigate his team around the island with no idea of what to do or what to say.  He might be the most sound character of the whole picture. He’s lovable and hilarious.

The film takes place in one day and it’ll leave you curious with how it all gets resolved among the two misunderstood factions.  Just when Norman Jewison ably reaches the highest summit of intensity, the oddest occurrence happens to shift the tide of the film’s characters and comedy.

Like other satire, particularly Sidney Lumet’s Network, The Russians Are Coming.  The Russians Are Coming. stands prophetically.  It was released in 1966, at the height of The Cold War with very fearful circumstances occurring in the news such as The Bay Of Pigs invasion.  Earlier this year, a sense of nervousness arrived when it was announced that Russian submarines have docked themselves outside of Cuba, seemingly lined up with Florida.  Anything could suddenly turn into a sad reality.  Still, how we respond to scary possibilities is how we live through these moments.  

You can laugh at The Bay Of Pigs crisis now.    Could you do it back when it was actually happening?  I wouldn’t know.  Yet, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make light of the situation.  Hogan’s Heroes, The Three Stooges, Mel Brooks, Charlie Chaplin and even the Looney Tunes ably served the purpose of needing to self deprecate our innate fears that would get all of us into nonsensical tizzies.  The Russians Are Coming.  The Russians Are Coming. was one of the best films to accomplish that feat.  

We gotta do something! I mean we really gotta do something!

THE JERK

By Marc S. Sanders

As I close out this year, 2023, it’s funny that one of the last films I watched was The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner with Steve Martin as dumb, lovable, idiotic, adorable, and moronic Navin – who was raised as “a poor black child.”  I find it funny because I have just come off the heels of directing a play I co-wrote with a best friend I just lost from ALS.  That friend was a part of my life for thirty years, and his name was Joe Pauly.  The play was a smack in the face, a head slammed against a door with an enormous amount of pratfalls to Charles Dickens’ holiday classic.  Joe and I called it A Christmas Carol Gets Decked. 

The play was an enormous box office hit for our theater, but the reaction to the show was mixed.  There were big laughs each night, but we also had some walkouts at intermission, and I wasn’t surprised.  Slapstick is not for everyone.  The cast was always brilliant though.

As I watched The Jerk, first I was sad that I never, ever talked about this movie with my pal Joe.  I bet he loved it.  Second, I found it fitting that my heroes Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel didn’t care for it.  Their review from 1979 can be found on YouTube.  Ebert simply said he didn’t like Steve Martin’s form of comedy.  He’s just not a fan.  Fair enough.  Siskel said the star’s brand of humor was Steve Martin doing Steve Martin, and it would have worked better as Steve Martin doing comedy as the character, Navin.  I do not think Gene Siskel is wrong.  I look at The Jerk, and I think Joe and I accomplished what Steve Martin was doing.  There is a collection of gags that I do not think are funny, but then there are at least an equal amount of jokes that are utterly hilarious and thankfully shocking.  Joe and I took a risk with comedy, just like Steve Martin; like anyone who is brave enough to enter through that dark valley alone where the act is always a test, night after night, performance after performance.

I love the plot of The Jerk, which is straight out of a Three Stooges short. Navin stands out from his family as the one with white skin and no rhythm amongst his large southern, black family.  I was so pleased to see Mabel King from What’s Happening!!! portraying Navin’s mother.  Following his birthday, Navin embarks on a journey to St. Louis to discover a life for himself.  He gets a job working for Jackie Mason at a gas station and falls into a fortune when he shares his invention for eyeglasses with a random customer (Bill Macy).  Along the way, he falls in love with Marie, a sweet Bernadette Peters, who looks like Alfalfa’s crush from The Little Rascals.  They get a mansion and live filthy rich, blah, blah, blah. SPOILER ALERT!!!!! The film’s famed director, Carl Reiner, reveals that Navin’s invention is defective and following a one, two, three class action lawsuit, Navin and Marie are flat broke.  I love the body of this plot.  Rags to riches to rags opens an invitation for one gag after another.

There’s his trusty dog named Shit Head.  Navin insists on no longer drinking the old wine.  Bring him the new stuff.  A crazed sniper (M Emmet Walsh) tries to kill Navin, misses and Navin reasonably concludes that it must be the oil cans that the killer has a grudge against, when the bullet holes spring leaks. Makes sense to me!  If you accidentally run outside naked to chase after the one you love, who is leaving you, then of course you will reach for the dogs nearby to cover up your bare behind and “your special purpose.”  Hilarious stuff.

There’s material that doesn’t work as well, but that’s just me.  Like the audiences that saw the play Joe and I wrote this year, what one person thinks is funny, another will not.  It’s a balancing act.  I’m not here to mandate what works and does not work for you.  I just want to celebrate Steve Martin’s inspired Three Stooges spawn that welcomed him to the big screen, long before the antics of Jim Carrey – who I rarely think is funny and simply comes off as an annoying child who won’t sit still.  That being said, I still prefer Martin’s  later work where he played the straight man victim to someone else’s annoyance such as in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (a favorite film of Joe and I, collectively) and Parenthood, not to mention the brilliant Only Murders In The Building, and his routines on Johnny Carson (a hilarious magician was my favorite) and Saturday Night Live.  The guy is an enormous talent far beyond The Jerk or The Man With Two Brains.

The Jerk had always eluded me, until now.  I think my parents wouldn’t let me watch it.  Dad thought the material was “filthy.”  He probably saw the one gag where the kid is running around with a t-shirt having the phrase “Bull Shit,” and thus opportunity passed me by.  Yet, he didn’t mind if I watched Dirty Harry or any of Bill Murray’s comedies.  Go figure.  That’s what the varying degrees of humor lend to you.  There are no straight answers in comedy.

Still, I’m glad I watched the movie.  2023 was melancholy for me.  There were some enormous ups, but losing my pal Joe, the Del Griffith to my Neal Page, was an expected but very hard moment to accept when he passed on December 4.  I’m still struggling with the loss.  In his last six months, he couldn’t speak with me on the phone, but at least I could text with him, and once the movie ended with Steve Martin happily dancing to banjo rhythms with his black family, I picked up my phone ready to write to him.  It couldn’t happen anymore.  At least not that way, from now on.  So, here I am on holiday break surfing Netflix, and there’s The Jerk with a warning that it was leaving the streaming service soon.  Joe must have been urging me to finally catch up with Navin, the poor black child.  Thanks Joe.

Chin up everyone.  We were all a name in a phone book. Happy New Year!!!!