By Scott Ross
Recently I had occasion, in considering Warren Beatty and Shampoo, to lament how few great comedies were made in the 1970s, a decade otherwise filled with recurrent wonders at the movies. How I forgot two of the best comic pictures from the close of that era I don’t know. The In-Laws, released in the summer of ’79, fell within a time when I was adrift and deeply anxious about my future, which may have had something to do with it receding in my memory. Used Cars, in theaters a little over a year later, I simply missed because it wasn’t in release long enough for me to get to it; I only caught up with it on video cassette in the late 1980s after plowing through all of Pauline Kael’s books and viewing as many of the movies she recommended and which I hadn’t seen as I could. I suspect in retrospect that my faulty memory had somehow lumped Used Cars in with movies that were made much later in the ’80s, when its form of comic outrage had become more common, if completely without its wit and originality and with a surfeit of gross-out gags and an accent on big-titted female bimbos in scanty clothing and the horny young dopes who pursue them. (Used Cars also uses female pulchritude in a comic way, not out of prurience but to illustrate its character’s sheer outrageousness.)
Re-viewing these two hilariously nut-brained farces recently on Blu-ray I realized that not only are they great original comedies but that both rank among the funniest movies of my experience. (I nearly died laughing at one of them, and not figuratively. More on that anon…) My reaction to The In-Laws in particular leads me to ruminate, as I have so often in my life, on the vagaries of human memory. How could anything that provides this much pleasure, and which is this gut-bustingly funny, register only vaguely in my movie memory? Well, that is why the gods made the Blu-ray player: To allow us to retrieve our memories and correct old misperceptions.
The In-Laws represents the triumph not of competent hack directing but of genuinely original screenwriting and utterly perfect comic acting. (The filmmaker here was Arthur Hiller, whose only other great pictures were also great in their screenplays: The Americanization of Emily and The Hospital, both by Paddy Chayefsky.) Andrew Bergman’s script, unlike most of the contemporary comedies which came before it — and nearly all of those that came after — is dazzlingly, deliriously funny from its comic heist beginning to its charmingly larcenous end. And while the cast brims with splendid comedic actors, from Peter Falk to Richard Libertini, Falk’s co-star Alan Arkin represents something far above mere inspiration. As Sheldon Kornpett D.D.S., whose life is turned upside-down by the prospective in-law played by Falk, Arkin gives a performance so perfectly timed and calibrated he gets deep belly-laughs from prosaic lines like, “Get out of my life!” Almost everything he does and says is not merely funny but riotously, achingly, side-splittingly funny. Sheldon is the upper middle-class emblem for every Jewish mother who dreamed of her son, the doctor; nominally neurotic before meeting Falk’s Vince Ricardo, he’s driven into such extremes of hysteria, panic and despair by his daughter’s seemingly unhinged father-in-law-to-be that he comes out of the other side of their shared experience as a man transformed.
Astonishingly for anyone who, like me, grew up seeing Arkin in comic roles in movies, on the Criterion Blu-ray commentary the actor says that he was unsure of himself as a comedic actor until after he made The In-Laws. Like Jack Lemmon, Arkin can get laughs by raising an eyebrow, and his reactions serve to make his fellow comedians even funnier: When Libertini as a South American dictator with a penchant for imitating Señor Wences makes a show of kissing Sheldon’s mouth with his fist, the unbelieving sideways look Arkin gives him makes an already funny bit hilarious,* just as his attitudes of despondency allow James Hong as a small airplane pilot-cum-steward nattering away happily in Mandarin seem even more delirious. The more Vince pushes at the limits of Shelley’s nervous understatement, the more Arkin’s hysteria builds and the funnier he becomes, so that simple declarative outbursts in Arkin’s hands rise to a comic level very close to the sublime. And even as Shelley begins to loosen up and actually enjoy the insane adventure Vince has drawn him into, he’s still hysterical, still the outraged little bourgeois dentist, and that duality becomes the comic engine driving the character. By the time Arkin and Falk are up against the wall and about to be shot by a firing squad Shelley’s hysteria runs in two directions at once: Despair and hilarity exist side by side, and are equally uproarious. Arkin’s performance ranks with the great comedic sound performances by male actors in American movies.
Falk in a way (or at least on the surface) has the easier ride. Vince is as unflappable as Lt. Columbo at his most impassive, and if you were an admirer of the actor and a fan of his television series you might be forgiven at first for thinking you’ve seen this performance before. But a spirit of antic invention resides beneath the sang-froid; Falk’s Vince Ricardo is like Columbo pushed into the realm of self-parody. He’s so adaptable he’s almost liquid, and nothing fazes him, not even facing his own imminent execution. (Of course, Vince knows a great deal more than Shelley, which accounts for some of his placidity.) If Vince wasn’t so blasé, if his approach to every fresh catastrophe was not a shrug, Shelley’s hysterical reactions to circumstances would not be as funny. There’s a marvelous scene in the last third of the picture where Shelley attempts to get away from Vince and the seedy hotel he’s ensconced them in where chickens walk around as if they own the place and when Arkin runs Falk tackles him and wrestles him to the floor. That is funny enough, but when they repeat the same actions a moment later what was amusing the first time becomes wildly funny the second. Yet their actions are perfectly logical for each, and the contrast between the two, equally extreme, polarities of personality is what makes the pairing work. The give-and-take between Falk and Arkin is, aside from Bergman’s comic brilliance at dialogue and structure, what makes the individual sequences hilarious. Probably the best example of this is the long, achingly funny scene in a New York diner in which Vince, with his preternatural calm, piles one verbal outrage on top of another, triggering Shelley to a series of frenzied responses. By the time he is screaming at Vince, entirely oblivious of the other patrons (who, needless to say, are hanging on every word of their exchange) I found myself alternatively roaring with laughter at the behavior of the actors and grinning at the dazzlement of the dialogue and the uncanny assurance of its writer.
Before writing The In-Laws Andrew Bergman, whose excellent dissertation We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films was published in 1971, wrote the entertaining (if excessively fag-bashing) Jack LeVine series of hard-boiled mysteries and the original screenplay Tex X, which became (with his active if overshadowed collaboration) Mel Brooks’ Helzapoppin Western spoof Blazing Saddles. Yet nothing in Bergman’s dramatic output quite prepares you for the beauty of The In-Laws. Aside from how funny it is — and it’s much funnier than the Brooks movie — I’ve seldom seen a better structured modern comedy. The individual scenes are beautifully conceived, and shaped, and they coalesce in a wonderful way, each sequence folding perfectly into the next with a logic that is both utterly insane yet entirely rational. Take that hoary caper cliché, the formula automotive chase: Perhaps due to the success of What’s Up, Doc?, in the ’70s such chases were almost de rigeur in movie comedies, and most of them fell flat, sometimes taking entire otherwise enjoyable movies with them. Here, the chase is as unpredictable as everything in the picture, and the details — Shelley, having seemingly given up, lying on a mountain of oranges in the plaza fruit market; the mobile unloading of a truckful of bananas onto the roadway — continue accruing, causing you to laugh at the movie’s sheer, clever audaciousness. It’s clearly a writer’s movie (actually a writer’s and actor’s movie) and Arthur Hiller’s competent, flavorless direction, like the bouncy John Morris score, is exactly what’s needed, its very ordinariness the perfect setting for the two comic jewels at its center. Style in movies isn’t always a matter of directorial flourish; with The In-Laws the style lies in that wonderful screenplay, and in the lead actors’ performances. If a better director had made the picture he might have interfered fatally with what makes it work.
Like The In-Laws, Used Cars, written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and directed by Zemeckis, likewise has a solid structure and is, if anything, even crazier. A roaring satire on the antics and practices of used car dealerships, it throws nearly everything at the premise and most of it is wildly, blissfully funny. The only place in the picture where the laughter sags a bit is during the climactic race across the desert, but the rest of it is good, dirty fun without recourse to mean-spiritedness. Once you get the measure of Kurt Russell’s amoral Randy Russo and how far he and his equally unprincipled staff will go just to get one lemon off the lot and into the hands of a gullible customer you know they’ll stop at little short of murder to do it, and you eagerly await their next outrage. (The slyly named Roy L. Fuchs, Russo’s rival and the twin brother of his establishment’s owner Luke Fuchs — both are played by Jack Warden — doesn’t scruple to any limits, including homicide; hoping to get his mitts on his brother’s land, Roy has one of his employees cause Luke a fatal coronary.)
According to Zemeckis and Gale the studio mishandled Used Cars, which should have been one of its year’s most popular comedies, through poor distribution.† What was lost in that miscalculation was not only the movie itself but Kurt Russell’s marvelous performance in it. For moviegoers of my generation, Russell was that handsome, likable kid in the Disney comedies; he wasn’t taken very seriously by adults and other critics but then I don’t suppose any of the adolescents who were my peers took him seriously either, although his portrayals, on television, of Charles Whitman and Elvis Presley were well received. The Disney comedies were of so little consequence it was difficult to gauge Russell’s potential, and I doubt anyone was prepared for how gleefully he gave of himself in Used Cars. Russell throws himself into Russo’s antics completely, never winking at the audience that, really, he’s a good guy: Russo knows that scamming the auto-buying public is small potatoes, done almost for the fun of it; his real ambition is to go into politics (for which by dint of his innate and reflexive crookedness he is more than eminently qualified) and he’s saving up the cash to pay off the local machine for his initial legislative seat. Zemeckis once characterized Used Cars as “a Frank Capra movie where everybody lies.” Randy Russo is hardly Jefferson Smith, but he isn’t Senator Paine either — although if Paine had one he could be a brash, conniving young nephew. Russo might not drive a carload of young boys off the road but he’d probably have the motor tinkered with so the engine would fall out on the tarmac.
Russo’s team is as cheerfully amoral as the boss. Jeff (Gerrit Graham) an inveterate horndog driven nearly crazy by ridiculous superstitions also has, as an accomplice, an adorably corrupt beagle called Toby and is not above setting customers up by pretending they’ve driven over Toby and playing the weeping little boy (“Mister, you ran over my dog!”). Jim the mechanic (Frank McRae) meanwhile is a sleepy black giant whose narcolepsy strikes without warning, usually when he’s in the middle of a job. Then there’s the videographer Freddie (David L. Lander) and his accomplice Eddie (Michael McKean) who’s an electronic genius and who facilitates the wild, FCC-defying live advertisements Russo stages during high-profile televised athletic and political events. Much of the fun of Used Cars lies in its piling up of comic outrage and the wilder the tactic Russo and his salesmen employ, the funnier it becomes. This extends to things we don’t actually see in the picture… which is why I very nearly died laughing at it: When one of Russo’s video stunts blows up in his face and Royal Fuchs takes an angry moral slant on it, Russo complains that nuns were protesting outside the dealership. “I had to get Jim to turn the fire house on them,” he says, and it was then I choked on my homemade chicken soup. But there was worse to come; I’d barely cleared the offending strand of white meat from my windpipe and taken another spoonful when McRae drawled out the casually indecent line that topped Russell’s and I found myself choking again. This hasn’t happened to me since the night several years ago on which I watched a certain comic documentary while wolfing down a mushroom pizza and was forced by that brush with mortality to imagine the next day’s small obituary headline: “Local writer killed by The Aristocrats.”
Among the many pleasures offered by both pictures are their wonderful supporting casts. In addition to Richard Libertini and James Hong, The In-Laws features nice turns by Nancy Dussault and Arlene Golonka as, respectively, Arkin’s and Falk’s spouses; a young Richard Paymer as an accommodating New York cabbie; Penny Pyser’s delightful performance as the bride-to-be; Sammy Smith as a philosophical patient; and Ed Bagley Jr. as an hilariously imperturbable CIA man. Used Cars offers, apart from Russell’s perfectly judged performance, the charming Deborah Harmon as Luke Fuch’s estranged daughter; the underrated Joe Flaherty as a dispassionately corrupt city employee; Dick Miller in a funny cameo; Betty Thomas (of all people) as a stripper; Wendie Jo Sperber as a monumentally uncertain high school student-driver; Dub Taylor as a political machine fixer; and, as if one Jack Warden were not cause for the usual level of celebration, two of him. The crowning glory, however, is the great Al Lewis as a local magistrate called “The Hanging Judge” whose bench is decorated with miniature capital punishment devices. That’s no more rooted in reality than a South American dictator going into a Señor Wences routine, but it’s every bit as funny.
Two final notes: 1) Unlike Zemeckis, Gale and Russell on the Blu-ray commentary, I do not find the sight of Warden as Luke Fuchs suffering an all-too-realistic heart attack hilarious. I hope their hysterical reaction had more to do with their memories of working with Warden than with the sight of an old man in the throes of cardiac arrest, but you never know.
2) It’s always a little disconcerting to see, usually in older movies, performers risking their lives and limbs for a shot, and in both The In-Laws and Used Cars the leading actors — Arkin in the first instance, Russell in the second — perform stunts in or on moving vehicles that are obviously not faked. Although Arkin’s double leaps onto the roof of a South American taxicab, it’s Arkin we see clinging to it and his look is, for once in the movie, unreadable: The rictus on his face could be the character’s slightly smug grimace of triumph, or the actor’s understated expression of terror. There’s also a sight gag in Used Cars involving the tailgate of a station wagon which, when you consider that young boys were involved, is appalling. It’s also one of the funniest bits in the movie, and elicits a roar of laughter no matter how many times you’ve seen it.
There’s some sort of moral or ethical conundrum wrapped up in that observation but just what it portends may be too unsettling to unravel.
*Libertini, with whom Arkin had worked onstage, was trying to make his co-star break up, and Arkin was equally determined not to.
†Used Cars also couldn’t compete with that season’s big hit comedy, Airplane!
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 