This only occurred to me when I saw it last night. This was Jonathan Winters' first gig after his nervous breakdown and hospitalization. He was surprisingly open about it at the time. He talked about it on one of his records we had when I was a kid. But, in the movie, he destroys the gas station because Phil Silvers has convinced Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan that he's an escaped mental patient. Seems like that hit a little too close to home.
There was a horrible incident in the early '70's I won't go into, but I saw it on the news as a child and was traumatized by it. Because of that, the end of the movie always horrified me. I can't watch it even now. How is that funny?
And now all the car wrecks in the days before seat belts are horrifying. Innocent by-standers are run off the road. Sid Cesar and Edie Adams would have died of smoke inhalation. I was a surprised at how much everyone hated cops back then, or at least that they were so open about this in a movie, and Jonathan Winters says something about businessmen who rob and steal from people every day.
And now I just feel bad about all the people who had their parts cut. Buster Keaton for one. Stan Freberg just sits in the background while Andy Devine does all the talking---I assume he had more to do than that.
Most of the main characters in it were terrible actors. Mickey Rooney was the only one who reacted appropriately to Jimmy Durante's death.
They kept calling Ethel Merman an "old bag" even thought she was 55. She was the same age as her son-in-law Milton Berle.
You think the black couple being driven off the road was racist? And there was all the misogyny, with Mickey Rooney's crack about the "emancipation of women".
Was it normal in 1963 for a man to offer a child money to get in a car with him the way Phil Silvers did?
And, while I'm discussing it, there was a scene early on before they start their high speed chase. Jonathan Winters is in the truck behind everyone else. He goes slower and slower. The others wonder what he was doing. He finally stops the truck. He gets out and tip-toes along the shoulder around a curve and finds all the others standing there demanding to know what he was doing. He lies at first and then admits, "All right. I was just trying to---aw shucks."
What was he trying to do? It made no sense. They decide to get their cars off the road---they're parked on a curve. They point to a place behind them. How did they turn those huge cars around and how could they do it safely when they were parked on a curve?
When Dick Shawn hung up on his mother, why didn't she just call him again?
This was cut out and restored in some versions, but when Dick Shawn hangs up the phone, he says,
"That's my mommy. She's gone crazy or something. MAYBE RAPE!" What kind of joke is that?
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