Crazy Madness
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (Coliseum; certificate.)—What a Crazy World. (Rialto; 'A' certificate.)
Stanley Kramer's Ir.) a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is an American slapstick view of human horridness and the slapstick muffles the moralis- ing so successfully that no one really seems horrid, or horribly situated, in the least. Its theme is the rich, much-used one of human cupidity: give five ordinarily amiable people the chance of getting a hand on 350,000 dollars and see what happens. The treasure hunt, involving nearly a score of treasure hunters, and finally what look like several thousand others, puts us (in Cinerama, and therefore intimately involved in swoops, explosions, upside-down flight, paint or fireworks in the eye and general mayhem) through every sort of danger and disaster, solid, liquid or airborne. Some of it is funny and furious, just occasionally touching one of those basic banana-skin nerves that dissolve or at least disarm criticism; but little of it is new and almost all Of it drags, for like its title the film is about two and a half times too long, and 190 minutes of concentrated slapstick, however starrily fes- tooned with faces, is about as wearing as 190 successive digs in the ribs. A psychologically dis- astrous interval at the height of disaster (a plane -trying to land with its pilot knocked out cold, a car sinking slowly in a flooded ford, a box of dynamite with the fire creeping closer) sud- denly makes one realise how long it's all gone on for; and the rest of the film, whipping up climax after climax, limps badly.
Michael Carreras's What a Crazy World is the film version of Alan Klein's musical on a now familiar theme: the awfulness of proletarian domesticity in this country these days. As ever, we have ranting dad and nagging mum (as ever played by Avis Bunnage), sexy sister and semi- delinquent boys, pin-tables and bingo, dogs and dance hall: all as familiar as the stage country- house used to be, and with the patter (and pattern of feeling) getting to be as stereotyped.
Its appeal to our feelings is ambiguous and the direction is often strangely inept, heavy-handed as Mr. Carreras's old horror films, with more excuse, used to be. It's not cheerful and it's not serious, it's not often funny and it's not really sad. It's a bandwagon film, a follower of every fashion in the anthropological study of proles that so often passes foil realism. Joe Brown makes a rather touching hero, waifish and chirpy and very clean and well-brushed; but everyone's roar or sigh of 'bleeding kids' at the end of nearly each song or sequence loses its point a bit when he's (clearly) twenty-two, his crony (Marty Wilde) is twenty-four, and every- one else around looks equally unkidlike.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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