It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Plot synopsis:
"Smiler" Grogan (Jimmy Durante), an ex-convict wanted by police in a tuna factory robbery fifteen years ago and currently on the run, careens his 1957 Ford Fairlane off twisting, mountainous State Highway 74 near Palm Springs, California and crashes. Five motorists stop to help him: Melville Crump (Sid Caesar), a dentist; Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters), a furniture mover; Dingy Bell (Mickey Rooney) and Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett), two friends on their way to Las Vegas; and J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle), an entrepreneur who owns Pacific Edible Seaweed Company in Fresno. Just before he dies (literally kicking a bucket), Grogan tells the five men about $350,000 buried in Santa Rosita State Park near the Mexican border under "… a big W".
Initially, the motorists try to reason with each other and share the money, but it soon becomes an all-out race to get the money first. Unbeknownst to them all, Captain T.G. Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), Chief of Detectives of the Santa Rosita Police Department, has been patiently working on the Smiler Grogan case for years, hoping to someday solve it and retire. When he learns of the fatal crash, he suspects that Grogan may have tipped off the passersby, so he has them tracked by various police units. His suspicions are confirmed by their behavior. Everyone experiences multiple setbacks on their way to the money. Crump and his wife Monica (Edie Adams) charter an old WWI-era Jenny biplane and eventually make it to Santa Rosita, but are soon unknowingly locked in the basement of a hardware store by its owner (Edward Everett Horton). They eventually free themselves with dynamite. Bell and Benjamin charter a modern plane, but when their wealthy alcoholic pilot (Jim Backus) knocks himself out drunk, the two are forced to fly and land the plane themselves. Finch, his wife Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and his loud and obnoxious mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman), are involved in a car accident with Pike's 1954 Ford furniture van. The three flag down British Army Officer Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas) in his 1951 Willys station wagon and convince him to drive them to Santa Rosita. After many arguments, most caused by Mrs. Marcus, she and Emmeline refuse to go any farther, and Finch and Hawthorne leave them by the side of the road in Yucca Valley.
Pike tries to get motorist Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers) in his ivory-colored 1948 Ford convertible to take him to Santa Rosita, but the greedy Meyer betrays him and races for the money on his own, leaving Pike stranded with only a little girl's bike from his furniture van. An enraged Pike catches up with Meyer at a gas station and assaults him as the gas station owners (Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan) try to stop him. Meyer escapes in his car while Pike literally destroys the gas station. He then steals the station's Dodge M37 tow truck and takes off after Meyer. Pike meets up with Mrs. Marcus and Emmeline and picks them up. While in a town called Plaster City, Mrs. Marcus calls her devoted, powerfully built, but impulsive and dim-witted son Sylvester (Dick Shawn), who lives on Silver Strand Beach near Santa Rosita, to get the money for them, but misunderstanding and believing his mother is in trouble, he instead races to her in his red 1962 Dodge Dart convertible.
Meyer experiences his own setbacks, including sinking his car while trying to cross the Kern River and nearly drowning. He manages to steal a blue 1956 Ford Sunliner belonging to a passing motorist (Don Knotts) by telling him he's with the CIA and re-joins the hunt. All the while, Culpeper and the police department observe their activities from afar. Around this time, two taxi drivers (Peter Falk and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) get in on the chase in their 1959 Plymouth Yellow Cabs.
Eventually all the characters arrive at Santa Rosita State Park at the same time and search for the big W. Emmeline, who wants no part of the money and doesn't take part in the search, looks up from taking a drink from a water fountain and sees, in the distance, "The Big W", composed of four palm trees growing in the shape of the letter "W". Pike finds it next and informs everyone else. Culpeper, who saw Emmeline's discovery, orders all policemen to leave the area, and goes in solo to retrieve the money. However, disillusioned by the greed and reckless behavior of so many supposedly law-abiding people during the course of the day, he now plans to take the money to Mexico to escape his own dysfunctional family and an apparently unappreciated career as an honest cop with a very small pension. After everyone digs up the money, Culpeper identifies himself and talks them into turning themselves in, promising a jury will be more lenient. But when the group sees Culpeper fleeing with the money, they realize what's happening and give chase in the two cabs. At that point, Chief Aloysius (William Demarest), who had (unbeknownst to Culpeper) blackmailed the mayor to triple Culpeper's pension, reluctantly tears up the pension papers and orders Culpeper's arrest.
After a long chase sequence, all of the men end up stranded on the fire escape of a condemned office building. The suitcase of money opens, and the money falls into the streets below, where passers-by scoop it up. The men all try to climb down a fire truck's extension ladder even though the fireman (Sterling Holloway) tells them "one at a time". Their combined weight causes the firemen to lose control of the ladder, whereupon it swings around wildly and flings them into various locations, causing many injuries and landing all of the men in the prison hospital wing.
The group, in various stages of traction, criticizes Culpeper for taking the money, but he replies that they will likely get off lightly because Culpeper will be there for the judge to throw the book at. He wonders if anything will ever make him laugh again, given that his wife is divorcing him, his mother in-law is suing for damages, his daughter is getting her name legally changed, and he is losing his pension. At that moment Mrs. Marcus, flanked by Monica and Emmeline, enters, begins to berate everyone, and promptly slips on a banana peel that Benjy had carelessly tossed onto the floor before the women arrived. She is carried out on a stretcher, still berating everyone, including those carrying her out. All the men, except Sylvester, start laughing hysterically despite the pain it causes; within seconds even Culpeper joins in.

Tags: comedy, insanity, absurd, satire, comic, revenge

Review:
Though lots of dialogue is amusing and all the performances are outstanding, but the movie suffers from a common delusion of people outside comedy, as Stanley Kramer was, that the mere vision of cars crashing is somehow funny in itself.
Again, some milk their small roles for what they are worth, giving the movie an undercurrent of true humor beyond the principals:  Don Knotts, Carl Reiner, Jesse White, Paul Ford, Jim Backus."Mad World" is most valuable simply because it is a cross-section of comedy in its day.
Jonathan Winters, whom Robin Williams used as a prototype, was the most gifted ad-lib comic of his day and rarely showed up well when he was constrained by a script and a sustained character, but he brings off many of the best laughs in this film, and, with Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan the most memorable set piece in the movie.
They may not all be funny every minute, but every moment they know what they're doing, crafting better performances than many Oscar-winning serious actors have ever turned in.Though the movie might be too bloated for the promised three hours' hilarious ride, with too much dependence on, "Hey, there's Edward Everett Horton flicking a switch!"  But anyone who loves comedy and its history needs -- deserves --  to see the best in the business of comedy in 1963 interacting with their schtick, especially if they don't mind sitting through -- occasionally mindless -- car chases and crashes..
A dying man (Jimmy Durante) who was thrown from a car that careened over a cliff, tells a group of witnesses to the accident (Sid Ceasar, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters) that there is $350,000.00 hidden under a big "W" in a nearby town, which sets off one of the wildest, craziest chase comedies made in the history of cinema.
A rather tired and haggard looking Spencer Tracy heads the cast as the cop on the trail of these greedy money-mongers and just about every comedian or comic actor alive in 1963 appears in this film, either in a starring role or cameo and despite this impressive gathering of the best comedic talent in the business, towering over all of them in one of her few film performances, is Broadway legend Ethel Merman, who gives the performance of a lifetime as Berle's shrew of a mother-in-law.
A few more treasure seekers get picked up along the way.That barebones plot description doesn't begin to tell you about some of the funny sequences that follow, Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney in a private plane with a drunken pilot Jim Backus passed out, Edie Adams and Sid Caesar trapped in a hardware store desperately trying to get out, Jonathan Winters as the lunkhead truck driver generally running amuck wherever he goes, and Milton Berle the henpecked husband of all time married to the beautiful Dorothy Provine, her braindead brother Dick Shawn and Ethel Merman the mother-in-law from hell.
And they leave a whole lot of some of the best character actors and comedians who each in their own way contributes a certain specialty they're famous for.There are two unbilled appearances by Jack Benny and Jerry Lewis each in situations that show off their peculiar style of comedy.Watching it all is Spencer Tracy as the Captain of Detectives of the Santa Rosita, Police Department both before the camera and between takes.
I don't remember much about it because I was only 6 years old back then, but I do remember the audience in the movie theater laughing continuously.I bought the DVD, which was remastered in DTS Surround Sound, a couple of months ago and it's definitely a good comedy classic to have.
They definitely don't make movies like that anymore, that's why I gave it a rating of 10.Although most of the actors in it have passed on, I still love the comedy and acting styles of Milton Berle, Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Buddy Hackett, Terry Thomas and others, plus there are cameo appearances in there with Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny and The Three Stooges..
This was the first time a comedy got the "epic" film treatment and after getting increasingly pretentious in his previous two dramas, Stanley Kramer just went all out for simple old-fashioned fun with the largest ensemble of comic talent he could get his hands on.
Just about every big name in TV comedy of the 50s and 60s is here and the results, while not the greatest of its kind ("The Great Race" is a funnier film in my opinion) still manages to deliver the laughs.It's too bad the remaining ten minutes (plus the police bulletins intermission) of the road show version still is missing, because the expanded version helped me appreciate the film a lot more than I did the first time out when I saw it on TV as a faded pan and scan atrocity.
Add a famous dramatic actor, Spencer Tracy, to the mix,, too, and you have one of the most famous comedies ever put on film.When I saw this in the theater, and even in the '80s on tape, I liked it immensely, but now it's just a bit loud and too much for me in spots.
Two things make it great: (1) the script, which is just crackling with fabulously hilarious lines for all the actors; and (2) the cast which, without doubt, is the greatest comic cast ever assembled in the history of the civilized world.It's so hard to single out individual performances when they were all so good, but...Spencer Tracy: his portrayal of the henpecked, tired, ready-to-retire civil servant is phenomenally realistic.Ethel Merman: can you even begin to imagine someone else in that role?
Made over 40 years ago, twice as long as any comedy should be, it is a non-stop, mad fun, and a very beautiful and well crafted movie to that, the true achievement by Mr. Stanley Kramer.
What did it take to send them all in the mad, mad, mad, mad race for the buried treasure that require them to drive, to fly, to swim, to run, to crawl, to fight, to cheat, and to fall hard from fire escapes, ladders, palm trees, and building tops under the watchful eye of the police chief Spencer Tracy (famous dramatic actor happened to be very funny, too) on his retirement day, and to have as the result the film that never hangs or runs out of breath - now this is a BIG W - WONDERFUL.
The thief Smiler Grogan, played by Jimmy Durante in his last screen appearance drives off the cliff and as his last words, before he kicks the bucket (literally) he tells the bystanders about the hidden $350,000 in Santa Rosita under the big W.The bystanders include comedy writer Dingy "Ding" Bell (Mickey Rooney), his writing partner Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett), moving van driver Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters), dentist Melville Crump (Sid Caesar) and edible seaweed company owner J.
Russell Finch (Milton Berle).Now all these people start a big race to get to the money.On the way they meet other people who find about the money and want to get it themselves.What they don't know is that they're being watched all the time and Captain Culpepper (Spencer Tracy) is aware of every step they take.Stanley Kramer is the director of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).This one tickled my funny bone.There's a whole bunch of fantastic actors/comedians that make sure you won't get bored.Spencer Tracy is fantastic as the tragicomic Culpepper who suffers both from stress at work and domestic stress.Milton Berle suffers mostly from domestic kind.He keeps popping pills mainly because of his mother-in-law from hell, Mrs Marcus.She's played by the wonderful Ethel Merman.His wife Emeline is played by Dorothy Provine.Sid Caesar spends some time stucked with his wife Monica (Edie Adams) and in an airplane built in 1916.Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney also have some unpleasant times in an airplane.Phil Silvers, who plays Otto Meyer makes Jonathan Winters mad.And see Winters on that tiny girls' bike.Terry Thomas as the British Algernon Hawthorne fights with Berle and Dick Shawn (Sylvester Marcus).Peter Falk is a cab driver and he's as funny as ever.Carl Reiner plays the tower controller.Charles Lane, who we lost last year at the age of 102 plays the airport manager.Andy Devine is the sheriff.Joe E.
Brown is the union official.Arnold Stang is the garage man Ray and Marvin Kaplan is Irwin.Don Knotts is very funny as the nervous motorist.Jack Benny is seen there as the man offering help.And so is Jerry Lewis runing over Culpepper's hat.The silent star ZaSu Pitts is Gertie the switchboard operator in her last movie.The Three Stooges appear as firemen.Buster Keaton does his moves familiar from his silent pictures as Jimmy the Crook.All those people and a few more make you laugh like you've never laughed before.Slapstick can't get too much better from this..
So I find myself here in my middle age with mixed feelings after just revisiting this extravaganza for the first time in many a year.It's very much a film of three parts to me, and each part impacts differently on the entertainment scale, the first part of this multi cast piece is as madcap and as mirthful as you could honestly wish to see, but this sadly ill prepares you for a middle part that outstays its welcome to the point that you can't believe they stretched it to an original cut of 3 hours.
The final third of the film saves it from smug overkill because by now you have invested so much time into the film, you thank the gods for any sort of frivolity, and thankfully the film does lift you back up to the happy place that you visited an hour before .The cast are fine, some brilliant shows are mixed in with the merely acceptable ones, and I wouldn't want to be so churlish as to dissect each actors respective show, but as a Phil Silvers fan I'm rewarded enough, and as a Spencer Tracy acolyte I'm burning candles again in his honor, but it's Ethel Merman as Mrs Marcus that lives long and glorious in the memory here, and honestly I feel the film is worth a watch just for her .
I only have vague recollections from age 13.Is what I think is still missing something that was really in the original presentation in Dec 1963--radio news bulletins intermission, Sylvester car stealing, Culpeper on phone with wife and daughter more, intro of the police reporter we see in one scene, getting Tyler Fitzgerald into a North Valley shower, Sid and Edie getting into a taxi at Blue Lake that they get out of in town, Don Knotts trying to call the CIA from a drugstore phone??I'd be grateful for reminiscences on an all-time favorite movie from the over-50 crowd here.
I only saw this twice in my life (my mother insisted on it, both times), the last time 30 years ago, and I still have a sour taste in my mouth.Take practically every living comic who made a movie between 1910 and 1950 and completely throw their talents away on cameos and one-liners (on the obviously self-indulgent whim that 'we're oh-so-much-more-sophisticated-now').Take a whole host of post-'50s B-movie character actors television comics and have them draw out every damn line and bit of physical comedy, until all possible laughter is lost in the bewildered effort to guess whether they'll ever stop.Dump in a whole ton of car chases, train chases, bicycle races, plane chases, along with the inevitable crashes of every description.Make sure your script is written by nihilistic cynics who think human beings are the lowest form of life on the planet, and comedy the lowest form of entertainment they ever came up with.As garnish add Spencer Tracy, who really does look like he's dying throughout the film.And voilà!
The film succeeds as much as it does from piling on talent: No sooner do the first group of comedians begin overstaying their welcome than they meet up with other, fresher characters, including Shawn, Terry-Thomas, and Phil Silvers as a delightfully snakey lowlife, one of the few characters in the story who genuinely deserves his miserable fate."Mad4" may celebrate film comedy, but most of its key actors earned lasting fame either on TV (Berle, Silvers, Sid Caesar) or on stage (Merman, Shawn, Jonathan Winters, Buddy Hackett).
Shawn is good, too, though I enjoyed his performance more when I was 15.Maybe the film's biggest miscalculation, other than going as long as it does, is casting Spencer Tracy as Chief Culpepper, who watches the proceedings with wry, tired bemusement.
I loved every single character,  but the standouts are Milton Berle as the pill popping wreck Russell Finch,  who seems to want to follow rather than lead,  and who repeats just about everything people already said;  Jonathan Winters as Mr. Pike,  the truck driver who makes anyone who crosses him pretty sorry for crossing him; Ethel Merman as Mrs. Marcus,  Russell's screechy mother in law who,  whether they like it or not,  is the leader of this mad pack;  Terry-Thomas (who also voiced Sir Hiss in Disney's Robin Hood cartoon!!!) is delightful as the British Colonel Hawthorne,  who suffers racial assaults from Merman and Berle over and over again;  Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett as Dingy Bell and Benjy Benjamin and their hilarious struggle to fly a rented airplane whose pilot gets knocked unconscious;  and of course,  Phil Silvers as Mr. Meyer,  the epitome of a dirty crook.
Reading through the comments, 'winner55' pretty much nailed it with 'greed and depravity' review Anyway, i first probably saw this movie as a little kid in the late 60s or early 70s.It seemed incredibly dated at the time, even though it was probably less than 10 years old.
Hollywood insulted our brains and our backsides with any number of "serious" epics in the 1950s and 60s, like "Ben-Hur," "Cleopatra" and "How the West Was Won." It also gave us the not-so-serious but no less boring "cameo" pseudo-adventure pics like "Around the World in 80 Days," which existed mainly as celebrity-spotting exercises for the movie audiences, and which I guess were supposed to tickle people silly by giving them a chance to recognize obsolete and creaky film stars popping up in bit roles as chauffeurs, doormen, organ grinders, etc.
So it was only a matter of time before Hollywood would give us a new mutation of the formula: the epic "cameo" comedy."It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" is of course ridiculously long, grotesquely overblown and as overstuffed as a Thanksgiving turkey, but it also happens to work a sort of charm on its audience.
Anyone who was anyone in the world of film comedy appears in the picture, either in a lead or cameo role, and the results are nearly frightening: any single member of the cast could (and did) carry films on their own, so when you throw them all together, it's like a shark feeding frenzy, with each actor trying his or her damnedest to shout down the others in an attempt to steal the scene.
Some, like Ethel Merman for example, are better suited for this than others, and they're the ones that you'll remember later.If watched in a certain frame of mind, "...Mad World" is grim and grueling, working over time to wring laughs out of its high-concept premise.
This film may not have invented the cameo appearance, (See around the world in 80 days, released in 1956 for that)but this movie sure has what could be the biggest cast of comedians and character actors ever in one movie at one time!
He worked with director Stanley Kramer a total of four times in his film career, so maybe it was a favor to Kramer for Tracy to do this film.If you're a fan of slapstick, comedians and comic actors, as well as classic character actors, you will probably enjoy this silly spectacular!
It makes "Cannonball Run" look like "Annie Hall."But Hollywood excess from 1963 tastes a lot sweeter and more wholesome than Hollywood excess from today, and it's hard to imagine anyone not enjoying the razor-sharp comic performances (especially from Ethel Merman), the spectacular chase/race sequences, the ditzy slapstick, and the general sense of goofiness.It's so entertaining I'd probably vote it an 8 if it were, say, two or two-and-a-quarter hours.
And this movie is brimming with so many recognizable names, it's starts sounding like a Who's Who of Trivial Pursuit Comedy Edition: Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Sid Caesar, Jim Bachus, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, and scores of others.
Spencer Tracy leads an all-star cast including Jimmy Durante, Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Edie Adams, Terry Thomas, Ethel Merman, William Demarest, Arnold Stang and Jim Bakus just to name a few of the dozens of comedic talents that add so much to this picture.
How the script writer and the director managed to coax such mediocre performances out of -- in no particular order -- Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Terry-Thomas, Dick Shawn, Jonathan Winters, Ethel Merman and Tracy (with cameos by Jack Benny, Rochester and Joe E.
Some of the all-time Hollywood greats are here: Spenser Tracy, Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Peter Falk, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Don Knotts, Carl Reiner, The Three Stooges (Joe Version), Jimmy Durante, Sterling Holloway, Jim Backus (Thurston Howell III), and more.
Where else could you find such comedic talents as Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Dick Shawn, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Terry Thomas and Sid Caesar (not to mention all the great cameos by other comedy legends).
And the chase is on.The principal funnymen (and woman) in the film, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, and the vastly underrated Dick Shawn are all extremely good.