A Mad, Mad Changing World

Look for the Big W at Santa Rosita Park -- Picture courtesy Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Last night, I watched a 1963 movie (now beautifully rendered in high definition wide-screen format): It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World. The director Stanley Kramer is known for much more serious fare like Judgment at Nuremburg and Inherit the Wind. He did one other social comedy of note, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967. However, Mad, Mad World was his only "magnum opus" screwball comedy. The movie featured a star-studded cast including Jimmy Durante in his last appearance, and Spencer Tracy in one of his last few appearances.

In a nutshell, the plot centers on roughly eight people who witness a tragic car accident in Southern California -- a man (Durante) drives his '58 Ford into a deep ravine. The other motorists, shocked by what they've just witnessed, park their cars; they climb down the ravine to offer help, but the man is too gravely wounded. Before he dies, he tells them of a fortune ($350,000 hard cash) buried in Santa Rosita Park. The witnesses include a dentist and his wife (Sid Caesar and Edie Adams), a van driver (Winters), a health food salesman with his wife & mother-in-law (Milton Berle and Ethel Merman as the in-Law) and two friends (Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney) sharing a red Volkswagen. When they can't agree on how the money should be divided, they embark on an insane race to see who can get there first.

Each group is remarkably incompetent in its efforts to find speedier transportation, get help from others without spilling the beans, or basically anything at all. I won't give away the ending, but this movie kept me riveted and laughing in spite of its 2 hour 40 minute length. It took me back to 1963, and caused me to ruminate about how times they have a'changed. Ethel Merman plays an over-bearing loud mouth, and the men in the group call her an "old bag" and an "old bat" to her face. Nowadays, such dialog in a movie would result in Congressional hearings on sexist language. Another scene shows a black couple run off the rode, their faces expressing stereotypical "wide-eyed" terror. This too, would be considered objectionable by current standards -- it wouldn't even make a final cut. Terry Thomas plays a British cactus collector; he goes into a couple of anti-American, anti-Madison Avenue diatribes that would probably be considered too divisive or too intellectual for current audiences. Sad, but true – we don’t won’t to be challenged with thoughts.

Mad World offers fascinating glimpses of a world 44 years in the past. The movie shows several new Chrysler and Chevrolet vehicles with bright red, bright blue seat covers -- I forgot that vehicle interiors were ever anything but brown, gray or black. They show rotary telephones and Mobile Oil gas pumps that look prehistoric. The women all have bouffant hair, high heels and bows -- they resemble life-size Barbie dolls. Some of it I remember fondly and wish we could get back to "innocent" times -- never mind the Vietnam War or the Kennedy assassination. The movie is still hilarious. It's too bad that modern movies have to mine all their humor out of sex and dialog contorted with political correctness. Mad World showed us how humor can be tapped from virtually any situation, and all these years later the humor is still vibrant.

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