Norman Lear said that he considered episodes of his TV shows to be one act plays. This movie, made before his first TV series, was the opposite of that. There were short dialogue scenes, but it was pretty much a big montage of a town where everyone agrees to stop smoking for one month to win $25 million from a cigarette company.
P.R. guy Bob Newhart convinces an extremely old cigarette company owner that he would be like Alfred Nobel, remembered for the Nobel Peace Prize which never interfered in his munitions business. It'd be impossible for an entire town to stop smoking anyway.
Dick Van Dyke as the minister in what seems to be the only church in a declining town of four thousand people who leads them to stop smoking so they can win the money. He played a nice guy, but not that nice.
People smoked way more back then. I was always slightly shocked as a kid---you'd occasionally walk past the Teachers Lounge, the door would open and they'd all be in there with cigarettes dangling from their lips. One or two would eat lunch in the cafeteria alone, surrounded by students, because the Teachers Lunchroom was so thick with smoke. Back then, if you had a one pack a day habit, you were a light smoker.
Full of actors who went on to appear in Normal Lear's shows. Jean Stapleton and Vincent Gardenia from All in the Family, Graham Jarvis from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Paul Benedict from The Jeffersons. With Bernard Hughes, Tom Poston, and Judith Lowery as an elderly foul-mouthed anti-Communist.
With Bob and Ray in multiple roles as reporters and interviewers.
I haven't seen this since the '70's when they'd show it on network TV.
Music by Randy Newman. Robert Downey Sr was a second unit director.
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