Mad, mad, mad, mad props
Much like the characters in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, I didn’t go looking for this crazy trip — it found me.
When I thought about reviewing one of the comedies of 1963, I actually thought I might revisit The Nutty Professor, based on its appearances on both the Cahiers du Cinéma and Jean-Luc Godard’s personal top 10 lists for 1963 — the French sure loved their Jerry Lewis! — plus this quite erudite essay, The Nutty Jewish Professor: To assimilate or to assimilate by Noah Berlatsky just last month. That’s a lot of favoriting.
Alas, I only made it through two nutty scenes before I turned it off.
Not so, It’s a MMMM World! What a good time this movie still is!
Country: United States.
Running time: 192 minutes.
Director: Stanley Kramer.
Writer: William Rose, Tania Rose.
Cast includes: Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Phil Silvers, Dorothy Provine, Terry Thomas, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Jim Backus, William Demarest, Norman Fell, Jack Benny, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Zasu Pitts, Carl Reiner, The Three Stooges, Stan Freberg.
Links: Wikipedia, IMDB
#3, US box office
(unranked), NYT top 10 (1963)
Academy Awards:
Cinematography (nominated)
Editing (nominated)
Golden Globes:
Actor musical/comedy (nominated)
Keywords: screwball comedy, chase, road movie.
Set in era: contemporary.
Is it well known? well known.
How did I see it? home.
Had I seen this before? long ago on video.
The Saul-Bass-created opening credits take quite some time to roll by, featuring an almost unbelievable sequence of famous names, followed by, “Our thanks and apologies to the following California communities (in alphabetical order): . . .” And that’s our introduction to the trail of star-studded destruction we are about to behold.
A man is swerving like crazy down a California highway in a frenzied dash toward something, we know not what, finally careening down a cliff and being thrown from the wreck of his 1957 Ford Fairlane. Other motorists descend the hillside and find the mangled schnozz and other limbs of Jimmy Durante.
Fresh out of prison, the old man has just enough life left in him to tell them of $350,000 in loot that he left in Santa Rosita. “It’s in this box, buried under this big W,” he says. “You can’t miss it. A big W! It’s been layin’ there for 15 years.”
The movie is very funny right away. Before they can go follow the money, this motley bunch decide, prudently, to make a plan for dividing up the treasure — if it even exists — rather than get there and fight over it when it’s too late. But even that’s complicated. Do you divide up the loot equally by person? (Then solo driver Jonathan Winters gets less.) Equally by car? (Then buddies Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett get half as much.) Equally by who helped at the scene and heard the clue? (Then the wives get nothing.) Hmmmm . . .
Sid Caesar finally gets it all sorted out. “Now, we give shares to everybody and for everything,” he says, going through every single possible thing from people to cars to going down the hill. “That would mean you get three shares for being three people, one share for having the car, one share for going down and looking at the wreck, and three more shares for being three more people in the car, which would give you a total of eight shares, giving you $112,000,” he tells Milton Berle.
Buddy Hackett, who doesn’t look like a guy who likes math, says, “Look, we figured it 17 different ways, and no matter how we figured it, somebody didn’t like the way we figured it. So now there’s only one way to figure it, and that is every man for himself!” And he dashes for his car, and so does everyone else, and we’re off to (fictional) Santa Rosita with a dozen stars in half a dozen different ways.
What follows are fights, explosions, floods, car crashes, carnappings, plane highjinks, drunk stumblebums, the Three Stooges pop up randomly, practically anything can happen. Meanwhile, the cops are surveilling the whole thing, figuring someone in this gang will lead them to the money. Spencer Tracy starts out detectiving the heck out of the case, but — is he getting designs on the buried treasure himself?
Watching Mad Mad World today, it’s maybe a little tiny bit less successful than in 1963, when it was #3 at the box office, just because of changing times. The darn thing is three and a quarter hours long, and I think if you were going to the theater on a Saturday afternoon in 1963 and making a day of it, and you have no distractions and you don’t have our modern trashed attention spans, you’d have no complaints at all. Today, eh, maybe you want something a little tighter. This time, I watched it in three parts on three different days and I just could have done with a little bit less. But whatever.
The movie is still conceived and edited to keep the action moving. There are individual subplots that are too long in themselves — Sid Caesar and Edie Adams trapped in a hardware store basement, Phil Silvers misadventuring around, Rooney and Hackett up in a plane they can’t fly, Winters with a retinue of others driving a tow truck — but they are all intercut with each other to keep the action going. It could have been better and more efficient, but chop-chop-chop-chop, it gets us to the final act.
And the final act is great! Let’s leave it at that. See the movie if you want to go back in time and have a good time doing it.
Rewatching It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, I couldn’t help thinking of the first Knives Out movie. It didn’t matter if you immersed yourself deeply in the psychology of the mystery — the real point was the all-out joy of watching so many favorite actors do this thing they were brilliant at and end up with something so fabulous. Same thing here.
I haven’t even mentioned Jack Benny and Rochester, Don Knotts, Jim Backus, Ethel Merman, Norman Fell or Carl Reiner, and I didn’t even notice Stan Freberg, Jerry Lewis, Peter Falk or Buster Keaton but apparently they were in there too. Many of these people I knew in childhood from game shows and talk shows, so they were a little after their prime to me, but imagine being a generation earlier and having grown up on Uncle Milty, Your Show of Shows, Andy Griffith and the rest, and seeing your favorites all in one tremendous picture. (And seeing your small-screen black-and-white TV stars for the first time in massive color Cinerama too!) Amazing.
Two standouts for me were Jonathan Winters and Buddy Hackett, who really were people I only knew as Tonight Show regulars in the 1970s without knowing why they were a big deal. But if you want two people who make this movie work, those are your guys. (Ethel Merman is a runner-up on this list.)
The movie was directed by Stanley Kramer, director of such weighty fare as On the Beach, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and literally no other comedies. Kramer “felt compelled to answer” for the “lack of lightness” in his earlier films, according to biographer Donald Spoto (quoted in Wikipedia). I’m not sure why, but okay! This one’s a big W.
(As far as star ratings, I’m ambivalent between giving the movie 3.5/5 the way I actually saw it at home in 2026 and 4/5 in ideal conditions in glorious Cinerama in 1963. I think it deserves the benefit of the doubt: ★★★★.)
Notes
1. The screenplay was written by the married couple William and Tania Rose. William had previously written one of my favorite films, The Ladykillers, made in 1955. The two also wrote Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, made in 1967, the same year they appear to have divorced.
2. The movie is available in a Criterion edition, which I didn’t know about or watch, so not in keeping with the intention of this blog, I didn’t watch any extras or commentaries and don’t have any deeper insights into the making and meaning of the movie. It’s just what it is!
The conversation
The Times critic loved the over-the-topness:
"It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” is everything, down to redundant, that its extravagant title suggests.It’s a wonderfully crazy and colorful collection of “chase” comedy, so crowded with plot and people that it almost splits the seams of its huge Cinerama packing and its 3-hour-and-12-minute length. It’s mad, as it says, with its profusion of so many stars, so many “names,” playing leading to 5-second bit roles, that it seems to be a celebrities’ parade. And it is also, for all its crackpot clowning and its racing and colliding of automobiles, a pretty severe satirizing of the money madness and motorized momentum of our age.
Bosley Crowther, Wild Comedy About the Pursuit of Money: ‘A Mad, Mad World’ Opens at Warner, The New York Times, 1963
While the New Yorker critic was way too good for this kind of drivel:
The demon of deliberate excess that drove Stanley Kramer to employ the same three-letter adjective four times in the title of his Cinerama comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” evidently prompted him to thicken the picture itself by the same primitive means. What must have begun as a charming enough little notion—to create a spoof of a Mack Sennett hare-and-hounds chase in modern dress—has been made to end as a juggernaut of many-times-repeated gags; its climax, a ghastly scene in a hospital ward, shows a gathering of immobilized near-corpses, and one can’t help thinking that they lie there crushed by something far worse than their latest misadventure. . . .
The screenplay, by William and Tania Rose, is said to have been described by Mr. Kramer as the funniest ever written. It must be very different from the movie.
Brendan Gill, Why, why, why, why?, The New Yorker, 1963
Here’s a quite thoughtful review from the modern era, which comes down on the side of not liking the picture too much:
What is zaniness, non-stop Rube Goldberg machine zaniness, if not an act of pure desperation? This is an almost 3-hour long film that refuses to be serious for its entire running time. It exhibits no shame in beating any dead comedy horse, right down to the inclusion of a banana peel pratfall. Amidst all its slapstick, one-liners, drunkards, fools and pugnacious simpletons, there’s roiling frustration. The characters often become totally exhausted, especially from trying to communicate with each other. I couldn’t help but absorb some of that worn-out feeling, as if I had been running and driving all over California too. Mad World was never intended for home viewing, especially not alone. Kramer even edited the film with gaps between lines of dialogue that anticipate the audience’s laughter. If you’ve seen the film before with an audience, then I suppose you had the privilege of surfing on those waves of laughter, vicariously enjoying any jokes you might have otherwise missed. This was my first viewing of any kind; I can’t say I enjoyed it.
George Hardy, So overambitious it’s amazing it doesn’t fall apart, The Geek Show, 2014
Country: United States.
Running time: 192 minutes.
Director: Stanley Kramer.
Writer: William Rose, Tania Rose.
Cast includes: Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Phil Silvers, Dorothy Provine, Terry Thomas, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Jim Backus, William Demarest, Norman Fell, Jack Benny, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Zasu Pitts, Carl Reiner, The Three Stooges, Stan Freberg.
Links: Wikipedia, IMDB
#3, US box office
(unranked), NYT top 10 (1963)
Academy Awards:
Cinematography (nominated)
Editing (nominated)
Golden Globes:
Actor musical/comedy (nominated)
Keywords: screwball comedy, chase, road movie.
Set in era: contemporary.
Is it well known? well known.
How did I see it? home.
Had I seen this before? long ago on video.