I took a class in high school called "Death & Dying". I don't know what year it was, but VCR's were just beginning to take over and we were going to finish the class by watching a movie about death. I think the teacher wanted to get Woody Allen's Love & Death but it was out, so he got The End. We had to get permission slips signed to see an R rated movie. I was eighteen and got to sign my own.
Directed by and starring Burt Reynolds as a shady real estate dealer diagnosed with an incurable blood disease. He has three months to a year to live. His doctor (Norman Fell) tells him his death will be painful so he immediately sets out to kill himself. After seeing his elderly parents (Myrna Loy and Pat O'Brien) and raiding their medicine cabinet, he wakes up in a mental hospital where fellow patient Dom DeLuise, having already killed his father, agrees to help Reynolds end his life.
With Sally Field, Carl Reiner, Kristy McNichol, Joanne Woodward, Robby Benson, and Strother Martin among others.
It picked up halfway through when Dom DeLuise appears. Much of the humor goes back and forth between Burt Reynolds' overwrought reaction to his diagnosis and people trying to cheer him up.
When girlfriend Sally Field tells him that she feels that something she did caused his illness, he said, "You don't give someone a blood disease. That's a gift from God," which is pretty mild movie blasphemy. Might give you the feel for this. It's not a realistic dramedy. Becomes slightly serious when he talks to his daughter and imagines her reaction to his death but that doesn't last long.
Burt Reynolds drives a lovely Jaguar XKE (E Type) convertible.
The teacher could have rented almost anything. Most movies are about death. We could have watched a war movie, a Bruce Lee movie, James Bond, especially On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The Third Man. Almost anything with a dog. I would say The Seventh Seal but it was in a classroom and you'd have to read subtitles from across the room.
Free on Tubi and Pluto.
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