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In the opening sequence of "Where's Poppa?", George Segal rises from his bed one morning, shaves, showers, puts on a gorilla suit and goes into his mother's bedroom, we realize later, to give her a massive heart attack that will kill her and get her out of his life forever. This is about the level of humor one can expect from most of this picture: insanity, blended with what might be taken as morbid daring.
Segal plays a New York attorney who lives with his supposedly senile mother (Ruth Gordon), whose life is further complicated when, while hiring a nurse to care for the old bag, meets the girl of his dreams, the pleasantly prim Trish Van Devere, decked out like Florence Nightingale. His dilemma: how to integrate the lovely nurse into his and his pesky mother's life.
Segal's performance is about the only thing holding the picture together. His frustrations, his reactions, his comic timing is almost peerless (whatever happened to that guy?); where the film fails is in other areas. Ruth Gordon's characterization is dreadful as the mother. At the beginning, you can't figure out if her character is senile or just being deliberately vague to keep her son from moving out. By the end, it's clear she's just nuts. When Segal brings Van Devere home to meet her, Gordon's eyebrows furrow and she gets a mean, sinister look. She wants the intruder in her son's life removed; she's calculating. This is not the mode of a senile person. You're not getting a consistent performance throughout the picture, which is probably the director's (Carl Reiner) fault as much as Gordon's. Ruth Gordon's old lady in "Rosemary Baby" is much more successful because with the kind of ingratiating, cloying person that Ruth Gordon generally plays, the audience responds to her as annoying. But when Mia Farrow is too timid to fight back, Gordon becomes more cloying, her fangs dig deeper and deeper and we're frightened for Farrow; this kind of imposition is genuinely terrifying. Here, we're being asked to laugh at what we'd normally find annoying, and if Gordon played it as helplessly nutty all the way, we might. But she's selfish and mean as well, and it dampens what little humor there is.
There are a few good laughs, though. A courtroom scene with Barnard Hughes as a military officer and Rob Reiner as a counterculture punk is fairly hilarious, and Vincent Gardenia does a nice turn as a Lombardiesque football coach. There's also an inspired bit where Segal's brother (Ron Liebman), having been stripped naked by muggers on his way to Segal's place, asks him for something for to wear home- and he gives him the gorilla suit.
But of a lot of the script is poorly conceived and simply doesn't make sense. Why is a New York lawyer with his own practice even living at home in the first place? Why does Segal, if his mother is senile, try to reason with her logically: "If you spoil this for me, I'll punch your f---ing heart out." Why does Liebman keep cutting through the park if he knows he's going to get mugged? Why does he take a taxi after leaving Segal's with gorilla suit? Why wasn't he taking taxis all along? A funnier bit would have been Liebman, as the gorilla, terrorizing the muggers. Why does Van Devere keep coming back- after her first husband was a kook, why does she want to get involved with this bunch? I suppose if I put this to Carl Reiner, he'd say, 'These are crazy people, they don't have to make sense.' Which is a convenient way to excuse a lousy script that's full of holes. The characters' moment-to-moment behavior may not have to make sense, but their motivations do, and that's where "Where's Poppa?" falls apart; the situations are created just to have the gag, and the gags are mostly one-shots, they don't build to anything.
Carl Reiner is the most guilty in this whole fiasco. How he has acquired this vaunted reputation as a pillar of comedy puzzles me; basically, his career has been to hold a microphone in front of Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks while they talk in funny voices. His son Rob has ten times the skill and intelligence as a director. In show-biz terms, Reiner pushes buttons; a monkey could do his job. And that is most apparent in his framing of the action. Why is all of New York shot in tight and in close-ups, but the scenes in the country are all distant and panoramic? That's the mentality of Carl Reiner's direction, claustrophobic for the city, spatial for the country. In the final lunatic scene at the old folks home, the camera is so far off, you can't even make out what's going on. The abrupt ending suggests a resolution that Segal could have easily arrived at ninety minutes ago; it also suggests Reiner couldn't figure out how to end the picture. So he just cut it, as another example of "craziness". Reiner seems to think dumbness equals craziness, and craziness without logic is always funny. It isn't, and the creators of "Where's Poppa" are as demented as Ruth Gordon putting Pepsi in her Fruit Loops.


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