Cinema
Stirring it up
Peter Ackroyd
Stir Crazy ('AA', selected cinemas) Gene Wilder has become . famous for the noises he makes. They veer from outraged screaming, like that of an ostrich which has suddenly realised that it cannot fly, to vague panting sounds as though he were continually lifting weights. Mr Wilder's face also lacks a certain dignity, and goes in opposite directions at the same time: the eyebrows shoot upward to reunite with the hair, the mouth sags downward in an expression of total disbelief. He is in a crazed state, the eyes blazing with light, the voice trying every pitch and failing to find the right one. He is, in other words, part of the American tradition of the innocent let loose upon the world, driven to desperation by each turn of events, quite unable to understand that any movement he makes is liable to consign him to the nearest mental hospital. He is undoubtedly the funniest of contemporary American film actors — although whether he is funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar, it is impossible to say.
Playing opposite him, in this comedy of prison life, is Richard Pryor, a black entertainer better known for his 'stand-up' routines in night-clubs and elsewhere. Black comics, for some reason, try much harder than white — with an inverted Uncle Tom-ism, they don't wish to be funny in themselves but rather by virtue of their acquired skills. As a result, they become too emphatic upon the screen. Richard Pryor suffers here from a kind of false expressiveness — he widens his eyes, does his 'jive' walk, and staggers back in mock alarm, as if he thought that this is what comic actors usually did. But he doesn't have quite enough acting ability to pull through unscathed — unlike Gene Wilder, for instance, he doesn't know what to do with his hands. (One should always look at the hands of actors — they are often the most genuine part.) But the fact that these two actors are altogether mismatched adds to the comedy of their partnership in Stir Crazy: they are, in the classic Hollywood style, two friends facing the world together, trying to 'make it' and 'be there', sharing everything but the same bed — Laurel and Hardy, but with much larger dreams. Gene Wilder plays Skip, an unsuccessful playwright; he is infinitely benevolent, appallingly naive, but with a suppressed strain of native cleverness. Richard Pryor plays Henry, a failed actor, more suspicious, more worldly but also clumsier and dumber.
The plot of Stir Crazy is not a memorable one; it is rambling and chaotic (a bad mistake in comedy), remarkable only for the number of scenes it can introduce which have nothing whatever to do with the narrative. It is, on one level, just a nurnbe; of loose ends hastily tied together. Skip Oa Henry, in search of easy money, dress tIP aS two woodpeckers in an advertising stunt f°1. a bank — this is, of course, Skip's idea. Ile, is the epitome of the misdirected will and, it he cannot create drama on paper, he will at least introduce it to life. Unfortunately, tW° robbers use the same costumes. Confusle'll carries all before it; false identities are made; Skip becomes hysterical, on alM°St tragic scale; Henry darts 'I-told-y0u-0 looks of rage at everyone in sight. Whe,11 they are both sentenced to 125 years In, prison, for the robbery which they did 0' commit, Skip turns to his lawyer with barelY controlled calm: 'Now what do you thir1,1c our next move should be?' The next move's 'inside', and Stir Crazy — almost bY accident — turns itself into a fairly accore,_te presentation of prison life. At first tue playwright is full of naive enthusiasm for b's new location. He starts a writer's notebook: 'PRISON MY FIRST TIME'. 'Who do 3°1 think you are?' Henry asks him, 'the Count of Monte Cristo?' From then on, the world catches up with them. They suffer the most extrenle hardships which a prison can provide, ondeAr the malevolent gaze of both inmates an' warders, until they decide to escape ur!dern the guise of rodeo riders. But Ame_.3" film-makers find it impossible to sustain comedy for long without introducing a little low relief; and Sidney Poitier, the director, Places sentimental vignettes and scenes of barely suppressed violence between the comic effects. It sounds, and is, improbable. In fact the major characteristic of this film is the comic extravagance yoked alongside a highly realistic and sometimes brutal account of prison life itself. The American cinema is excessive in any case, and lends itself readily to paradoxes of this sort. And it is quite extraordinary how American actors can play absolute good!less, or absolute evil, without any trace of Prly lighting up their furiously bland features. The film, in this sense, becomes more of an exercise in black humour than the presence of Gene Wilder might suggest; it Is an American version of Joe Orton's World in which the macabre and the pathetic continually poke through the comic busine,ss, America and Orton, however, do not nux easily. Stir Crazy ought to have remained entirely in the hands, or at least the Personality, of Gene Wilder himself.
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