Prison Flicks

Rating: (2 out of 5)

Starring: Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Georg Stanford Brown, JoBeth Williams, Miguel Ángel Suárez, Craig T. Nelson, Barry Corbin, and Charles Weldon.

Wilder and Pryor don’t quite recapture the fun of Silver Streak (1976).

In Stir Crazy, Gene Wilder plays both a romantic lead and a rodeo champion. That’s right. He manages to catch the eye of cutey JoBeth Williams and also tame a bucking bronco. He manages to do this while behaving in his trademark lilting fashion, which suggests nothing more than a light-in-the-loafers surfer overdosing on Prozac. Wilder, by the way, has been genuinely funny in several movies… here, though, he’s just a bit weird. Maybe the world is coarser nowadays, maybe tastes have changed, I don’t know, but his act seems odd rather than amusing.

The other lead is Richard Pryor. The general consensus on Richard Pryor is that he was a comic genius – edgy and imaginative. I guess. Comedy often does not age well, but his stage shows still hold up okay. The same can’t really be said about his feature films. Pryor, for all his comic innovativeness, made a series of surprisingly bland motion pictures. Not just bland, actually, but worse, slow-paced and often cloying, especially in the early 1980s (including Bustin’ Loose (1981), Some Kind of Hero (1981) and The Toy (1982)). Stir Crazy has a few memorable moments, but on the whole it just drags. It isn’t aggressively awful like Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969), but nor is it particular inspired either.

Skip acts a mediator, not noticing that the guy on the left is squeezing the guy on the right’s nut with a pair of pliers. Zany!

In Stir Crazy, Pryor plays Harry Monroe and Gene Wilder plays Skip Donohue. We meet Harry first in a deadly, enthusiasm-draining scene. He’s an out of work actor, working as a waiter at a fancy society dinner. All the diners are, um, a little giddy and very hungry. It turn out, wait for it, that the cook mistook Harry’s stash of pot for oregano. This Cheech and Chong-style scene goes nowhere and fizzles out. The problem isn’t just that the scene isn’t very funny or that there is no payoff, but rather that the scene is completed disconnected from the rest of the movie. Indeed, the Harry from the first scene could be a completely different character. He never again seems to be an aggressive stoner, and throughout the movie Harry plays the level-headed part of the twosome, so his histrionics at finding that half his stash went into the soup seems completely out of place.

Wilder’s first couple of scenes aren’t much more promising. First Skip is a weird store detective, who gets fired for harassing an actress he accuses of shoplifting. Even with the whole Winona Ryder thing fresh in my head, it wasn’t funny. Then Harry and Skip meet for drinks. As they are gabbing, a fight breaks out between a diminutive cabbie and his passenger over a fare dispute. The taller man tosses the cabbie around like a sack of potatoes, but the cabbie keeps after him. Finally, Skip goes to break up the fight, but as he does, unbeknownst to Skip the cabbie grabs a pair of pliers and attaches them to the passenger’ scrotum. This, naturally, makes the bigger man much more accommodating, but Skip thinks the conflict is resolved thanks to his intervention and soothing manner. Har har har. At least this scene is consistent with the rest of the movie, in which Skip is continuously well-meaning but a little clueless.

Well, anyhoo, Harry and Skip decide they’ve hard enough of New York and agree to set out for sunny California to see if they have better luck breaking into show business on the left coast. Skip is a writer with about as much success as Harry has had as an actor. A charming element of this movie is how matter-of-fact Harry and Skip are about their friendship. As you know, Harry is black and Skip is white. If this movie were made today there would be a lengthy digression to explain how it is they became friends, and how their different backgrounds have affected their lives, and so on… because you know, Hollywood is really in the business of educating us all on issues of racial tolerance and sensitivity. Hooray for Hollywood.

Skip and Harry as singing woodpeckers. Wacky!

So, long drive. They set off in a beat up van. Unsurprisingly the thing conks out before arriving in California. Surprisingly, the van makes it all the way to Arizona. Of course, since both Harry and Skip are out of work, they don’t have the money to pay for repairs, so they need to find a job before they continue their journey. The movie doesn’t make clear how these two planned to live in California without money or jobs, but whatever. Where there is a will, there is a way… which is precisely what the hundreds of young people who go to LA looking for fame and fortune every year believe… at least for the few weeks before they get dragged into the meat grinder of commercialized sex and drugs. In many ways, Skip and Harry are lucky their van breaks down short of their destination. Otherwise, they’d be bottoming in gay porn loops within a month.

Okay, so here’s the scenario. You’re stuck in Arizona. Broken van. No money. Do you (a) Call home and ask a friend to wire you a loan? (b) Get job as a short-order cook at a local greasy spoon? (c) Hitchhike to get back on the road? Or (d) dress up as chickens and perform promotional jingles in a bank lobby? Right. (d).

The actual ditty they sing goes something like this:

Oh you’ll save money, knock on wood
when you do what a good woodpecker should.
Save for a horse or a brand new ranch
when you walk to the glenboro saving’s branch.
You can feather your nest with frills, (Gene and Richard shake their tail feathers here — literally)
fill your garage with a Coupe Deville,
just relax if you have a big bill.
What you can do is be a smart bird too,
you little pecker you.

Is that Amy Carter looking on?

The patrons break out in spontaneous applause, which sort of confirms my suspicion that outside of big cities entertaining is hard to come by. Funny scene? Yeah, I guess. Funny in concept, and reasonably funny in execution. But there is no way to watch this scene and not think, “Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor hamming it up.” The narrative just comes to a grinding halt. This is the sort of thing that only happens in movies. Indeed, could only happen in a movie. The only thing dumber than the idea of selling banking products with a pair of dancing chickens is having them dance and sing in the bank’s lobby. Hellooooo! The customers are already there. They don’t need to be sold on the bank. Having the chickens perform out front, or in some other venue might almost make sense – as much as dancing chickens ever makes sense – but in the bank makes it just a comedy bit. If I were a patron I’d be (a) pissed that these two clowns were distracting the tellers and making me wait and (b) wondering if this was a serious establishment. There is a reason why banks used to have those big marble columns, to make people think their money was safe. Away, this scene is obviously just a sketch. Like the pot in the soup and the nuts in the pliers. “Hey Warden, lighten up! It’s a comedy,” I can hear some of you saying. Yeah, it is comedy, but there different kinds of comedies. There are gagfests and there are comedies with plots. Airplane! gets away with being just a series of gags because, well, that is what it aspires to do. Stir Crazy, by contrast, tries to make us actually care about the characters and care about how the plot resolves itself. Different standards.

“Yeah, we bad!” A reasonably funny scene, but not as funny as you might remember.

Anyway, the whole dancing chicken thing does have a payoff of sorts as far as the plot goes. Two locals who see the whole chicken act get to thinking. They wait until Skip and Harry are on a lunch break and steal the costumes. Dressed as chickens, the locals then proceed to stick up the bank. They get away with the money, and, of course, our hapless heroes gets blamed for the crime. They get tossed into the local jail, where Skip and Harry strut around, trying to seem tough. “Yeah, we bad,” they cluck. As you might imagine with Gene Wilder involved, this is less than completely successful. Following a quickie trial, Skip and Harry get sentenced to 125 years in prison. As uninspired as the movie had been to this point, it now takes turn for the worse.

I feel goofy even describing the plot. Okay, see, the warden (Warden Beatty played by Barry Corbin) is a real hard case. One thing he does with every new inmate is toss him on a mechanical bull, which usually results in the unfortunate new fish getting thrown violently in a matter of moments. Skip, though, is a natural. A born rodeo cowboy, don’t you know. Now, it seems to me that a good rodeo rider has two essential qualities: superb balance and extraordinary upper body strength. Does this seem to describe Gene Wilder to you? Me neither. Okay, well, whatever, Skip is a natural. Now, this become important because every year there is a prison rodeo, and the prison warden bets a huge sum of money on the outcome of the competition. This is a hoary old chestnut, isn’t it? I mean, M*A*S*H (1970) had a similar plot device as did The Longest Yard (1974), and if I gave it any thought I bet I could find two dozen other examples that preceded Stir Crazy.

Coach, the warden, and Harry look on in shock as Skip masters the mechanical bull. I don’t have anything to add here; I just wanted to write the phrase, “masters the mechanical bull.”

It gets worse because it turns out that Harry and Skip have decided that can’t handle prison life, so they want to escape. Another inmate Jesus (Miguel Ángel Suárez) claims to know the blueprint to the stadium where the rodeo is held and says it is possible to escape during the competition. So, now Skip is willing to participate in the rodeo in order to escape, but he needs to make sure that Harry and Jesus are also there to escape with him. So we get a tedious sequence where Skip refuses to participate until he can get the warden to agree to let him choose his own “team.” The warden, at first, doesn’t want to allow it, although we never learn why he is so resistant.

The resultant sequence is endless, as the warden and his Deputy Warden (Craig T. Nelson, a.k.a. Coach) tries to break Skip’s will, and Skip pretends to be unaffected while Harry drags himself around looking like death warmed over. Apparently director Sidney Poitier was so taken with Pryor and Wilder’s “genius” that he allowed them to ad lib all sorts of scenes. I believe it. The result ain’t that funny, and I can see why. I’m sure Pryor and Wilder were real hoots on the set, cracking jokes and goofing around. Some of the scenes must have taken days to shoot as a result, with everyone getting punchy and silly in the process. We’ve all been there right? Whether it is pulling an all-nighter in college, or crunching on a work deadline, or sitting in an airport waiting for the weather to clear. Someone starts joking around and before you know it everyone is nearly wetting themselves they’re laughing so hard. Have you ever tried to then relate the hilarity to someone who wasn’t there? Right exactly, that’s the basis of the expression, “I guess you had to be there.” See, I’m sure the set of Stir Crazy was great fun, but you also probably had to be there to really enjoy the result up on the screen.

You can just imagine the suspense when this is the escape vehicle.

What makes it worse is that all of this functions as set-up to a long, drawn-out, tedious sequence where our heroes actually escape from the rodeo. It just goes on and on as we literally watch each man sneak through a hole in the locker room, into a roasted peanut cart, and out to a waiting car. The entire rodeo sequence has only one decent laugh in it, namely when Harry finds out what he will be expected to do in his role as rodeo clown (lure the rampaging bulls away from the dismounted riders for you city folks). Other than that, it just feels like padding. Ultimately, the talent in front of the camera wasn’t matched by the talent behind the camera. Neither director Poitier nor film editor Harry Keller (67 at the time and editing his first theatrical release since the 1950s) were able to use Wilder and Pryor effectively. The side plot about Harry and Skip’s lawyers (including a young JoBeth Williams who falls for Skip after a series of brief conversations) finally getting them freed by finding a witness (a little girl) willing to testify that they weren’t guilty doesn’t even try to get laughs. There is funny bit about a hulking mass murder, Grossberger (played by 6′6″ MIT grad Erland van Lindth), who terrifies the rest of the prisoners, but who turns out to be a soft touch for Skip’s soothing manner.

There is no edge to this movie. It is all soft contours. And yet, it isn’t really much of a family movie either, in the sense that kids would probably find little to interest them. If you’re willing to forgive scenery chewing, there are a few decent scenes, especially in the first half. But once the movie shifts to prison, the whole thing feels like it is dragging around a big ball and chain. And that is one prison metaphor that does not bode well for a movie.