Comedy: Big Bucks, Few Yuks

By RICHARD CORLISS

What is the sound of one man not laughing?

There are few more dispiriting recreations than sitting in a movie theater watching a failed comedy with a large audience. They came to have a good time. They've already paid for it. So, by God, they will have a good time--even if the experience is as sad and mechanical as two hours with a lethargic masseuse. These days, too many comedies are in the hands of writers and directors rehashing tired formulas, retyping favorite old jokes, doing the expected. Funny thing is, audiences still do the expected too: they go, and they laugh. This holiday season, moviegoers are flocking to such putative laff-riots as Popeye, Nine to Five and the quartet of movies below. Maybe people simply enjoy sharing the sound of their own laughter: it's one of the few ways Americans have left to make a joyful noise.

STIR CRAZY

Directed by Sidney Poitier

Screenplay by Bruce Jay Friedman

This film's premise is simple: contrive, however flimsily, to get Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor into standard comic peril--a barroom fight, a mistaken-identity bank heist, a kangaroo court, a venal prison system, a convicts' rodeo, a speeding car--then watch them wriggle out with their resourceful wit and eloquent body language. Wilder moves with the psychotic serenity of someone who believes everything will turn out O.K.; Pryor trembles with the neurotic certainty that everything has already gone wrong. Wilder's is the fantasy of the liberal do-gooder; Pryor's is the reality of the mean-streets black. As Wilder ejaculates into the air, spouting whinnies and karate grunts, Pryor quakes in his boots, murmuring an awed, all-purpose excretive expletive. These two guys are splendid to watch.

Perhaps Pryor does too much watching: Wilder gets to do all the arabesques while his partner waits for him to fall to earth. Viewers too must stand around as Stir Crazy makes wrong turns, slogs across Saharas of unnecessary plotting, and unravels at its denouement. But that may simply make the triumph of Wilder and Pryor all the more savory. Recipe for a popular movie: take a series of stock situations, two gifted farceurs, and stir. Crazy!

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN

Directed by Buddy Van Horn

Screenplay by Stanford Sherman

This is the second in Clint Eastwood's "Philo and Clyde" series, which began two years ago with the enormously successful, whimsically reprehensible Every Which Way But Loose. Eastwood's Philo Beddoe is an amiable auto mechanic who hulks through the West saving damsels in distress and giving big bullies savage whuppings, the sound effects of which they will never forget. His menagerie includes a dotty ma (Ruth Gordon), a slow-witted pal (Geoffrey Lewis), a not-entirely-trustworthy girlfriend (Sondra Locke), a bumbling gang of neo-Nazi motorcyclists and an orangutan named Clyde, who steals the show with animal athletics and a vocabulary of obscene grimaces. Eastwood, who can be a compelling, charming screen actor, seems content here to watch the other performers pamper their eccentricities while he stands off to one side, as glum and immobile as a Teamster's ashtray.

Though the Which Way films enunciate the sentiments of comradely conservatism ("Handouts are what you get from the Government; a hand up is what you get from a friend"), their values are more than a bit askew, even for a no-holds-barred comedy. The viewer is to find the battle of a snake and a mongoose reprehensible, but applaud the climactic spectacle of two brawling men making hamburger out of each other's bodies. It says something about the American body aesthetic that Eastwood's previous picture, the innocently droll Bronco Billy, failed at the box office while Philo and Clyde, the Ape Man and the Ape, have moviegoers queuing and cheering.

SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

Directed by Jay Sandrich

Screenplay by Neil Simon

Neil Simon likes old times--the screwball comedy of the 1930s, to be precise--enough to revive the tradition, or at least prop up the corpse. In Seems Like Old Times (S.L.O.T. for short), he has updated Leo McCarey's delicious romantic farce The Awful Truth, this time with Chevy Chase in the Cary Grant role, Goldie Hawn as Irene Dunne and Charles Grodin as Ralph Bellamy. If the new cast spells magic to you, rush to S.L.O.T. You'll see Chevy stumble down an entire hillside and get his nose bobbed by a series of vengeful swinging doors. You'll see Goldie giggle and mewl her way through a dozen predictable dilemmas. You will find that you've seen all this before, and better.

Simon has written funny plays and films, and will again. Jay Sandrich directed TV's finest comedy show, Mary Tyler Moore; he may someday learn to shape character and situation to fit the big screen. Goldie Hawn will remain the put-upon pixie into her twilight years. And for Chevy Chase, as for the most miserable sinner, there is always hope of redemption. One wonders, though, about Charles Grodin. Here, as in Heaven Can Wait and It's My Turn, this marvelous comic actor filches attention from the stars with his maddeningly reasonable response to every crisis. But how long can he play second banana, on whose sleek skin the other actors do pratfalls? Perhaps his next film will give him the break, and the shining costar, he needs: Muppet Movie II, with Miss Piggy. Otherwise, Grodin may grow arm-weary trying to get comic capital out of unproductive S.L.O.T. machines.

FIRST FAMILY

Directed and Written by Buck Henry

There were possibilities here. Bob Newhart plays the President of the United States; Madeline Kahn is his dipso wife, Gilda Radner his ditsy daughter. Superb comedians play supporting roles: Harvey Korman, Austin Pendleton, Bob Dishy, many more. And Buck Henry keeps threatening to prove himself a Renaissance man for this dark age of comedy. He has shown his talent in screenplays, magazine writing and, most convincingly, as a frequent guest on the Tonight show, where his deadpan surrealism is most at home. Henry may need collaborators--a Mike Nichols, a Johnny Carson--to spark his wry, reactive humor. On his own, in First Family, he fails utterly.

Henry began with a funny situation but no plot. So he resorted to a feeble device: the meeting of senescent civilization (the President's clan) and wily savagery (the potentates of Upper Gorm, an African nation with rich uranium deposits). When Newhart meets the Gormese, the two men cannot understand each other, which makes for five minutes of ennui. They are not the only odd couple in the film. In scene after scene, behavioral comedy attempts to engage in a dialogue with slapstick satire. But these are different comic languages, and the two forms finally fall silent in defeat. Maybe Henry should appear on TV less and watch it more. Any episode of M*A*S*H, Taxi or The Muppet Show has more laughs and pathos per minute than this impeachable farce.

--By Richard Corliss

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