Picturenose

Picturenose.com is delighted to welcome Paul Stump esquire into its hallowed halls - renowned author and journalist, Paul is also no slouch when it comes to the silver screen and as such will be appearing here regularly from now on. An appreciation of Stanley Kramer’s madcap movie to end all madcap movies from 1963, to get Paul’s ball rolling…

As much a part of a 1970s Christmas as too much Tunis Cake, this ludicrously OTT piece of caperly brilliance still never leaves any indigestion. Three hours of chases, slapstick, mugging, and it works. It still works. Written by the husband and wife team of William and Tania Rose, it was an attempt to recreate the spirit of the Roaring Twenties in an America of Deco, Fins and conspicuous consumption - why else are the yellow Plymouth cabs in the climactic sequence so grandiose, why else is the loot the dramatis personae hunt down buried beneath four palm trees in the shape of a big ‘W’ overlooking a Pacfic Ocean of pristine azure beneath the double-dazzle of a California sun?

The film is occasionally in-your-face - but in a good way, as per Dick Shawn’s unforgettable psychotic hipster Sylvester (’You’re startin’ to bug me, man’). This is turbo-capitalist film-making, with a cast to die for, all allotted their party pieces - Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Jonathan Winters, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney and Phil Silvers do their turns, and best of all, Terry-Thomas, in a role that cemented his place among Hollywood’s elite, as J Algernon Hawthorne. His bitter beef at America’s obsession with ‘bosoms’, directed at a miserable Berle, is William Rose, an anglopile, biting back at America the Big.

If you don’t get this movie, you don’t get silliness. And that, alongside tragedy, drama, humour and wit, is one of the things makes memories. A great movie.

161 mins.