You mean . . . he just went sailing right out there?
Did he make any kind of a statement before he died?
I’d once read that it was the same stretch of road where his daughter, Mia, was killed 20 years later, but can’t find current confirmation so I no longer believe so.
Kovaks died either reaching for or trying to light a cigar, leaving Edie Adams with hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay off in taxes: which she did in part by becoming the spokesperson for Muriel Cigars.
[Shrug] The movie went over with me like a lead balloon, especially Phil Silver’s con job and the nurse slip-and-fall at the end (yes, I have suffered slip-and-falls myself, which took a while to heal). Whatever the humor was it went way over my head; I was 26 the first (and only) time I saw the movie. Well, there’s no point casting pearls before swine…
I remember that when it happened since Mia was only a few years older than me. Not that I believe in such things but it almost makes me think that family was cursed.
[QUOTE= C K Dexter Haven]
(2) Timing. Physical humor relies entirely on timing, and the timing is often off. Someone mentioned the final chase, which just isn’t funny; and, OK, winding up on the fire escape and falling off has some humor to it, but not when the same thing (with minor variations) happens 20 times.
[/QUOTE]
That’s my main problem with movie too. Directing a comedy is a special skill and that’s why many more-than-capable directors have stumbled when they tried to do broad physical comedy (e.g., Speilberg with 1941). Because a lot of physical humor depends on the element of surprise, a director can’t let the audience get ahead of him. This happens all too often in IAM4W due to Kramer’s sluggish comic pacing. You’re also right regarding the film’s climax on the fire escape/fire ladder. Even as a kid I thought it would’ve funnier if one of the characters, after a few hairbreadth escapes, managed to get off of the ladder and onto the ground unscathed–and then get whacked by speeding fire truck a half-second later.
I like the movie a lot. Highlights for me are Terry-Thomas’s rant about Americans’ obsession with bosoms, and Jonathan Winters single-handedly destroying the gas station.
On second thought, change “whacked by [a] speeding fire truck …” to “whacked by a speeding ambulance.” That’s funnier.
“If American women stopped wearing brassiers your entire economy would collapse!”
Great flick! For me, the best part was when the still-drunk Jim Backus tries to fly the airplane. Anybody remember the brief appearance of the “Three Stooges”? I wonder what they were paid for that? Who was the buy with the glasses (co-owner of the gas station that Jonathan Winters destroyed)?
That was Marvin Kaplan who also played the newspaper editor’s stooge in The Great Race.
The stooges were experiencing a resurgence of popularity about then. “Curly Joe” de Rita had joined them, they were making movies (instead of shorts), and were appearing on TV. They also had a brief scene in the Dean Martin/Frank Sinatra movie Four for Texas about this time.