Moviegoer Diary: All Night Long, Slapstick Of Another Kind

ALL NIGHT LONG

Plot In A Nutshell
Jean-Claude Tramont’s quirky 1981 comedy about an executive (Gene Hackman) who re-evaluates his life after getting demoted to night manager at a convenience store and falling in love with a ditzy married woman (Barbra Streisand) with dreams of becoming a professional songwriter.

Thoughts
I watched this one on the strength of Pauline Kael’s rave review, which appeared in her collection Taking It All In, and in which she favourably compared director Jean-Claude Tramont’s approach to the work of Lubitsch, Ophuls, and Tati. I was also intrigued by the unlikely romantic pairing of Hackman and Streisand, and also by the fact that the script was by W.D. Richter, future writer of Big Trouble in Little China and director of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. That’s a pretty crazy batch of ingredients — what would they combine to produce?

A fairly likable little comedy, as it turns out — maybe not quite special enough to be called a “buried treasure” (and, with apologies to Madame Kael, nothing on the level of Lubitsch, Ophuls, or Tati), but a movie whose affectionate, empathetic depiction of people pulling themselves out of their workaday ruts and pursuing their dreams definitely resonated with me at this point in my life.

If it had been made in 2010, All Night Long is the kind of movie that would probably have shown at Sundance and maybe it might have even gotten picked up for a modest fee by Fox Searchlight. But I’m glad it was made in 1981 instead, because if it had been made today, the characters would have been about 15 years younger, and the director would have packed the soundtrack with a lot of songs from indie bands, made the sets look cooler, and basically poured a lot more energy into giving the characters more hipster credibility. But that complete lack of hipness is a big part of All Night Long’s appeal: even as Hackman drops out of the corporate world, he retains his essential squareness — he’s an old-fashioned guy who likes to tinker with tools and dreams of being an inventor. His first invention is almost touching in its earnest spirit: it’s a mirror that shows you your image in reverse so that for the first time, you can “see yourself the way others see you.”

If All Night Long had been made in 2010, the casting of Barbra Streisand would be an ironic stunt. In fact, she plays the role with utter sincerity, and she’s not bad either — and yet, the mere fact of her huge stardom in real life acts as kind of destabilizing force as you watch the film. You can’t help but be distracted by the puzzle of what a megastar like Barbra Streisand is doing in such a slight little movie, playing such a sweet, slightly dim little nobody in pink velour whose idea of a romantic meal is a couple of pieces of break with a can of undiluted cream of mushroom soup and a can of tunafish dumped over them. You feel the disconnect most strongly in a scene where Streisand sits at her organ and tries to come up with lyrics for the song she’s writing. Streisand intentionally sings off-key, and her lyrics walk that Ishtar line of being at once terrible and yet utterly inspired. You know that Streisand is capable of so much more that you can’t help but feel that she and the filmmakers are looking down on this character, deliberately making her appear pathetic, refusing to imbue her with the talent they’re capable of giving her, and you wonder why they just didn’t give the woman a different ambition besides singing when Streisand was cast.

Dennis Quaid plays Hackman’s ne’er-do-well son — he’s also having an affair with Streisand until Hackman comes along. I’d forgotten about this period in Quaid’s career, when he was always getting cast as sexy young lunkheads ruled by their cocks — the walking epitome of “young, dumb, and full of cum.” He’s still got a little bit of baby fat on him in this movie, and even though he’s taller than everybody else onscreen, he charges through rooms like an overgrown kid who hasn’t yet realized his own size. Diane Ladd is Hackman’s uncomprehending wife, and Terry Kiser — best known as the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s — has a funny scene as the guy who tells Hackman what to expect on the night shift at the store and hands him a gun, cryptically explaining that the company likes to keep a weapon on hand “for insurance purposes.”

Ira Newborn’s score is TV-generic (maybe a little bit of indie rock wouldn’t have been so bad), and there are a couple of awkwardly staged slapstick fights. But there are also a few scenes that feel just about perfect — like the one where we see Hackman working as a singing waiter in an Italian restaurant, joining in with the rest of the staff as they entertain the diners by singing the “Anvil Chorus” and clearly having the time of his life. I don’t know if I can exactly picture Hackman joining Streisand in bed quite so lustily, but I’m happy to cut All Night Long a break and go along with it. If I could see myself in Hackman’s mirror, I might not think myself such a prize either, but a few people have found a way to love me too, right?

RATING: 3/5

* * * * *

SLAPSTICK OF ANOTHER KIND

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director/producer Steven Paul’s bizarre 1982 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick, in which Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn play freakish-looking, superintelligent twin siblings who have grown up in seclusion from their embarrassed parents, pretending to be mentally handicapped cretins.

Thoughts
Sean Penn in I Am Sam. Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi in The Other Sister. Rosie O’Donnell in Riding the Bus With My Sister. These are all mortifying screen performances as people with mental disabilities, but none are as grotesquely, sickeningly unwatchable as the sight of Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn, wearing buck teeth, Dumbo-sized ears, and bulging prosthetic foreheads, clad in bibs and adult-sized blue and pink footie pyjamas, sitting down at the dinner table and throwing spaghetti at each other for three minutes.

I can think of few films as spectacularly misbegotten as Slapstick of Another Kind, so much so that my reactions to it feel inadequate and banal. How did Steven Paul hold this project together? How often did Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn look at each other on the set — perhaps in between takes of the sequence where they dress up in sailor suits to meet the president of the United States (Jim Backus!) and greet him by chasing him around the room and farting — and sign in despair. What morale-building speeches did Steven Paul have to give the cast and crew to keep them distracted from the mind-bending awfulness of the film they were making?

If Slapstick of Another Kind reminds me of another film, it’s Skidoo, Otto Preminger’s 1968 LSD comedy starring Groucho Marx, Carol Channing, and Jackie Gleason, another inexplicable, memorably awful collision between countercultural satire and big, broad, old-fashioned supper-club comedy. Vonnegut himself admitted Slapstick was one of his worst books, but at least it contains traces of his wry wit, and his distinctive ability to balance his despair at the state of the planet with his faith in the ability of individual human beings to occasionally rise above our more selfish instincts. Slapstick of Another Kind is like an anthology of wretched comic ideas: 10 minutes at the top of the film wasted on jokes about how ugly the infant versions of Kahn and Lewis are; a running joke about the helium-voiced, foul-mouthed, two-inch-tall Chinese ambassador (Pat Morita), who flies around in a spaceship shaped like a fortune cookie; characters running around in sped-up motion like bobbies in a Benny Hill sketch; food fights; a character putting his head through a painting; Marty Feldman smearing mashed potatoes over his face and getting tomato sauce ladled over his head; Jerry Lewis falling a dozen stories into a wheelbarrow filled with brown paint; Merv Griffin trying to get a laugh by calling an Asian character a “zipperhead”; raspberries; crossed eyes; farts.

As a terrible, terrible song called “Puttin’ Our Heads Together” (a reference to Lewis and Kahn’s ability to increase their brainpower by pressing their foreheads together, Rain Man-style) plays under the closing credits, you’re too stunned to move. “We’re puttin’ our heads together / ’Cause two heads are better / Than one!” goes the song as you try to sort through the images dancing spastically through your head, 80 minutes of racial slurs, overlit sets, cars and airplanes fueled by chicken droppings, and Madeline Kahn solemnly explaining that she’s not afraid of the bats in the attic because “They’re my friends — bats are animals that God made for ugly people.”

I can’t imagine who movies like Slapstick of Another Kind were made for. The cameos by Samuel Fuller, Orson Welles, and a pair of extras dressed up like Laurel and Hardy seem to place it within our universe, in which movies make coherent sense and seem designed for large numbers of people to find them entertaining — and yet it appears to have emerged from another reality altogether. Sadly, there seems to be no way to send it back.

RATING: 0/5