WAITING FOR GUFFMAN: shining a spotlight on small town America

It’s a complete waste of time to search for the town of Blaine, Missouri on the map.

As the setting for WAITING FOR GUFFMAN Blaine certainly looks like a picture-perfect example of small-town America but it doesn’t exist.

It’s a three dimensional figment of the unique imagination of Christopher Guest, the film’s actor-writer-director and a keen student of the ridiculous in everyday life.

WAITING FOR GUFFMAN zeroes in on Blaine as the burg prepares to celebrate its 150th birthday with a musical celebration titled “Red, White and Blaine.”

The town council hires failed Broadway director Corky St Clair (Guest) to create the extravaganza. Corky’s big on ambition but tiny on talent and misguidedly sees the show as his ticket back to the big time.

He motivates his cast of five amateur thespians (all equally tiny on talent) by telling them that important talent scout Mort Guffman will be in the opening night audience and if he likes what he sees they could all be heading to the Great White Way!

WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is a wonderful example of the genre which Guest has made practically his own – the mockumentary - a comedy masquerading as a documentary.

There’s a real art to this kind of sharply observed, non-judgemental humour and – having cut his mock documentary teeth as Nigel Tufnel in “This is Spinal Tap” - Christopher Guest is a master of the craft.

He peoples Blaine with a cast of characters who are funny precisely because they take themselves so seriously. They see no humour in their behaviour, fashion sense, and relationships and would be embarrassed and appalled if they realised that others were laughing at them.

Guest’s Corky St Clair is blatantly camp with an ill-advised toupee and a barely disguised crush on his hunky leading man, yet everyone with the exception of the leading man’s father, accepts Corky’s mannerisms as “artistic” and nothing more.

Corky, in turn, never thinks to challenge town dentist Dr Pearl’s (Eugene Levy) characterisation of himself as a genuinely amusing entertainer even though it’s obvious to us outsiders that he’s substituting hard work and enthusiasm for any actual showbusiness talent.

And no one at all considers it the least bit strange that city’s sole travel agency is run by the Albertsons, a couple who’ve never left Blaine. Sheila (Catherine O’Hara) is a borderline hysteric with a drink problem while Ron (Fred Willard) is hearty but oppressively overbearing.

It’s the highlighting of these foibles, failings and idiosyncrasies which makes the townsfolk of Blaine so real and endearing. Corky and company unselfconsciously bring to life the eccentricities we recognise in those we work and socialise with, even if we don’t always spot these same flaws in ourselves.

A comedy which is both subtle and laugh out loud funny 1997’s WAITING FOR GUFFMAN was the first of four mockmentaries to team Guest with Levy, O’Hara and Willard and the three subsequent outings  – “Best in Show”(2000), “A Mighty Wind” (2003) and “For Your Consideration” (2006) are all worthy of equal praise.

A hugely entertaining send-up of small-town American life, amateur theatricals and the human condition, WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is a genuine viewing pleasure that will give you an itch you just can’t scratch enough for more of Guest’s output.

LOOPER: I've seen the future and it looks like Bruce Willis

The most depressing aspect of director Rian Johnson's imagining of our near future is not the widespread homelessness or the rampant, casual gun violence.
It's the fact that in 2044 we'll be driving the same cars as we do today!
Seems that President Obama's rescue of the US auto industry 3 years ago wasn't enough to ensure long-term survival and after 2012 Detroit just stopped designing new cars.

All-in-all the next thirty years does not hold much for us to be cheerful about if LOOPER is to be believed. This thriller paints a pretty grim picture of the United States where the only thing that's really different from today is that engineers have found a way to take the wheels off motorbikes and make them hover a few feet off the ground.
Well, that and time-travel.
It still doesn't exist in 2044, but by 2074 it will have been invented and immediately banned, but that doesn't stop criminal syndicates from our future's future using it to send back to their past (but our future) criminals that they want murdered. That's because by 2074 not only will we have time travel and hovering motorbikes, we'll also have a body tagging system that makes it almost impossible to do away with someone surrepticiously.
So those marked for death are bundled into the time machine (which looks like an industrial washing machine) and dispatched to 2044 where Loopers like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are waiting with a shotgun to blast them into eternity.
It's a profitable business if you don't mind the blood but it comes with an inescapable expiry date. In order to conceal the fact that they're using illegal time-travel to bump-off undesirables, the mob of the future also periodically sends back the older versions of the Loopers of 2044 to be executed by their younger selves, thereby closing the loop.
Which is how Gordon-Levitt finds himself hunting down Bruce Willis, who is the Joe he's become by 2074, and whose time is now up.
Because Willis was Gordon-Levitt he knows the fate he has in store, and he's determined to avoid it so he can find and kill the child who will grow up into the ruthless mob boss who orders his execution.
(I promise you, this is definitely easier to follow on the screen than in print).
All of which sets up a tense cat and mouse game that allows Gordon-Levitt to show off his impressive Bruce Willis impression (with a little assistance from a prosthetic nose and - more disturbingly - lipstick and over painted eyebrows) and Willis to demonstrate that at 57 he still possesses his 'Die Hard' era tough guy chops.

I'm a sucker for time travel movies and particularly enjoyed writer-director Johnson's refreshing twist on the traditional time travel plot, with the younger Joe having zero interest in learning anything about his future from the older Joe, while the elder Joe's contempt for his younger self's hotheadedness is tempered by his vested interest in keeping him alive.
Stand-out amongst the supporting cast is Jeff Daniels demonstrating there's more to him than two decades of bland leading man roles might have suggested, while Emily Blunt also acquits herself well as the world's most unlikely farmer.
LOOPER is a gripping combination of sci-fi and thrills which will keep you pretty much on the edge of your seat right up to the final showdown. It works because the story is unpredictable, uncomplicated despite the subject matter, and succeeds in avoiding most of the holes and implausibilities which tend to dog time-traveling tales. With just one exception that I spotted, there's not the distractions caused by trying to figure out whether a certain thing really would or could happen when a character travels through time.
With LOOPER to add to 'The Dark Knight Rises', '50/50' and 'Inception' Gordon-Levitt continues his inexorable march towards Hollywood leading man status and director Johnson sets himself a high bar to clear with his next project, whatever that may be. For the rest of us, unburdened by such career opportunities or challenges. there's nothing more required than to sit back and enjoy.

 

ARBITRAGE: forget the title, feel the tension

Wall Street bankers and their ilk are rapidly becoming Hollywood's default bad guys. It's not surprisingly really given the financial misery they've inflicted on millions since 2008.
The latest incarnation of amorality and greed on two legs is Robert Miller.

He's a ultra-wealthy hedge-fund manager up to his neck in the brown smelly stuff.
And it's a situation entirely of his own making.
He's trying to sell his company before the buyers discover a 4 hundred million dollar hole in his accounts.
He's also trying to keep the financial quagmire a secret from his family.
And he's trying to placate his increasingly resentful and frustrated mistress who wants more of his time than he feels able to give. 
Despite the challenge, Miller's proving successful at keeping his head above the far less appealing equivalent of water until the fateful night when he falls asleep at the wheel.
For those who believe that those with money and influence have been getting away with it for too long, what happens next makes for sweet revenge.
It also makes for compulsive viewing.
Where 2011's 'Margin Call' focused on the complexity of the financial deals that brought about the crash of '08 and required close attention to follow what was happening, ARBITRAGE uses the world of high finance as the backdrop to a more traditional style of thriller. The focus here is less on the detail of the monetary shenanigans and more on the man at the centre of them.
As played by Richard Gere, Miller is outwardly a pillar of Manhattan respectability. He's just made the cover of Forbes as a shining example of hedge-fund smarts, and he and wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) are generous patrons of various charitable causes. Miller's smooth, sophisticated and keeps his iron business fist buried deep inside an alluring velvet glove.
There's been much chatter about Gere's performance being Oscar-nomination and while it's true that he is totally convincing in the part and absolutely holds our attention whenever he's on screen, I'm less sure that what he does rises to the level of Oscar-worthy. He didn't blow me away like George Clooney did in 'Michael Clayton.'
Perhaps the problem is that Gere makes it all look so effortless. He doesn't simply play Robert Miller, he is Miller. He is a character we can believe exists outside of the confines of the movie. He had a life before the events depicted here and will continue living after we take our leave of him.

What is indisputable is that ARBITRAGE is Gere's film. There's strong support from Sarandon, Brit Marling (as Miller's grown-up daughter and chief financial officer at his company), Nate Parker (as a young man whom Miller helps and uses without understanding how the two are mutually incompatible) and Tim Roth as an NYC detective - with a decidedly dodgy American accent - on a mission to bring Miller to justice, but it's Gere who dominates.
Much credit is also due to writer-director Nicholas Jarecki who has created a powerful, tense and compelling story which is nowhere near as predictable as one might expect given the subject matter.  It really does keep you guessing to the very end and, unlike 'Michael Clayton',  the plot is as strong as the performances.
Do not be dissuaded by the title (which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means "the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies"). An MBA is not required to appreciate this impressive thriller.

SKIDOO: a drug fueled trip to self-indulgent hell

Few films better illustrate mainstream Hollywood's complete inability to grasp late 1960s counter-culture than SKIDOO.
Otto Preminger's 1968 cinematic rendering of an LSD trip is enough to put Charlie Sheen off drugs for life.
Produced and directed by the autocratic 63 year old and starring two actors with a combined age of 99 this film never stood an icecube's chance in hell of accurately portraying the youth dominated hippie movement and its fascination with peace, love and illegal substances. Heck, it's not even an entertaining parody of the culture!

But it's worst offence is not the patronising attitude towards the teens of America who chose love over war, nor is it the simplistic and stereotypical depiction of their alternative lifestyle.
It's the sheer boredom of the undertaking.
The opening scene is an ominous portend of what is to come, with Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing as Tony and Flo Banks, a long married middle-aged couple bickering over which tv channel they're going to watch. With Preminger's camera holding steady on the Banks's tv screen it switches back and forth between channels as Tony and Flo use their respective remote controls to battle for supremacy.
The temptation to reach for my own tv remote and hit the OFF button was immense, but I resisted, persuading myself - in the words of 1990s Irish dance band D:Ream - that "Things Can Only Get Better."
Oh D:Ream, what a heavy burden of guilt it is you bear.
Not only is that song forever etched in my memory as the soundtrack to Tony Blair's 1997 general election triumph and with it the image of John Prescott, Peter Mandelson and other Labour heavyweights half-heartedly mouthing the lyrics at their election night party, but it is also my automatic default internal debate clincher when faced with unmitigated dross like SKIDOO.
No D:Ream, things did not get better. They got worse.
This nonsensical, inconsequential and completely unengaging waste of space turned an hour and 37 minutes into an eternity - and not in a good way.
The leaden comedy drags along, seemingly oblivious to its awfulness and the absence of elements that might loosely be termed entertainment.
I stuck around because once I start watching a film I am really really really loathe to bail on it and also because I wanted to see how the famous old timers in the cast fared.
Not very well as it turned out.
Groucho Marx looked and sounded all of his 78 years. Not even a jet black wig and painted-on mustache could conceal his tired and weak appearance, and his obvious reading of his lines off cue-cards.

George Raft had a nothing bit part which traded on the fact that he was George Raft, former big time movie star, without giving him anything worthwhile to do. I shouldn't have been surprised at that. It's what he did in practically every film he appeared in after his star waned in the mid 1950s.
Mickey Rooney, Cesar Romero, Peter Lawford and Peter Lawford were all similarly underused.
Which left me with Gleason, whose appeal eludes me, Channing in her underwear, which is now  an image now, unfortunately, burned onto my retina, and a surprisingly charmless Frankie Avalon.
SKIDOO is bizarre, undeniably different and monstrously awful. It's not even bad enough to boast kitsch appeal. It's just self-indulgent rubbish by a director who should have known much better.

SCANDAL SHEET: this thriller really grips!

SCANDAL SHEET is a gritty fast paced film noir that packs a whole lot of punch into its brief 82 minute running time.
Based on a novel by fledgling film director Sam Fuller, this is a story that'll grab you by the throat in the opening minutes and just refuse to let go until its gripping climax.
And that - in no small part - is due to Broderick Crawford's mesmerising performance. Playing Mark Chapman, the brutish, unscrupulous editor of the New York Express newspaper whose only concern is the number of zeroes on the end of his circulation figures, he dominates the screen and absolutely demands our attention.
Chapman has no time for ethics or morals. He doesn't care whose lives he tramples on or whose reputations he destroys. His sole ambition is to give his readers what they want - or what he thinks they want - and that's cheap sensationalism and the exploitation of those who can't answer back.
And while he sits in his office and barks his orders, it's his protege, ambitious young reporter Steve McCleary, who eagerly puts Chapman's philosophy into practice. When we first encounter him in the film's opening scene he's scoring an exclusive interview with a distraught woman whose sister has just been hacked to death. He gets to her before the police do by passing himself off as a detective and laughs in her face when she rails at him for tricking her. 
And it's McCleary in his zeal to please his mentor who sets in motion the seeds of his destruction. Latching on to the apparently run of the mill suicide of a down on her luck middle aged woman in a seedy rooming house, he discovers she was actually murdered shortly after attending an Express sponsored Lonelyhearts dance. He decides to exploit the connection for maximum publicity and insists it be splashed on the paper's front page, unaware that her killer is his boss.
And if that's not a contrived enough coincidence, Chapman actually encourages him in his hunt for the killer because the story is just too good to pass up.

There's no need for a spoiler alert because SCANDAL SHEET is not a whodunit but a will he get away with it. The thrill is not in trying to guess the killer but in watching McCleary painstakingly piecing together the random clues and wondering when - and if - Chapman will act to protect himself from discovery.
With such a short running time all this naturally unspools at quite a lick and that's good because it helps mask the deficiencies of its two young co-stars. John Derek is too much of a fresh faced pretty boy to be entirely convincing as the kind of journalist in whom an experienced editor like Chapman would place so much trust and confidence.
It's equally difficult to understand why Donna Reed, as the conscience of the newsroom, continues to date McCleary when he's so brazen about his manipulation of the news. McCleary embraces everything she disdains yet she's endlessly willing to give him another chance. If McCleary really were the hotshot journalist the film wants us to believe he is he'd be running around town with fast women and hanging out at nitespots til the early hours, not placating dull as ditchwater Donna.
Not quite a hidden gem but certainly not a diamonique bracelet either SCANDAL SHEET is definitely worth checking out just to sweat along with Crawford as he and we wait to discover whether he's gonna get caught or get away with it.

MEN IN BLACK 3: cast turns the neuralizer on themselves

and completely obliterate their memory of how to have fun.
MEN IN BLACK 3 is a weirdly joyless experience. Weird because it shouldn't be.
All of the elements that made the first installment so much fun are present and correct;

the original stars - Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones,       
the original director - Barry Sonnenfeld,
a multitude of heavily disguised aliens in mostly working class professions and closely monitored by the Men in Black,
an extra-terrestrial threat to the future of Earth which only Agents J and K can avert.
So what's not to work?
The story is slick and inventive yet also limp and lifeless. It's not a pleasure to watch and it's certainly not funny. Will Smith reprises his role as Agent J with professionalism, and Josh Brolin is efficient as a young Agent K, but there's no real energy in the film.
The reason?
This is a franchise that's run out of steam, that's just going through the motions, and deep down inside everyone involved knows it.
Everyone that is but Tommy Lee Jones.
He's not sensing it deep down inside, he's showing it right on the surface. He's barely in the film and when he is he looks like a man who'd much rather be back on his ranch. Heaven knows how big a check was dangled in front of him in order to persuade him back for a third installment of MIB but it wasn't enough to switch him out of autopilot mode.
With Brolin playing it equally laconic and monosyllabic as Jones's younger self it's left to Smith to do the heavy lifting and expending all that exertion leaves him no energy for creative comedy. He's even farmed out the theme song to Pitbull whose uninspired sampling of Mickey and Sylvia's 'Love is Strange' is not a patch on Smith's 'Forget Me Nots' sampling 'Men in Black.'
MEN IN BLACK 3 is not a bad film but it is a disappointing one. If you come to this expecting to relive past glories you will leaving feeling cheated. The magic is missing.

THE CAMPAIGN: I demand a recount.. or a recut

Cut through all the breathless hype and what you're left with is just another under performing Will Ferrell comedy.
Once again countless opportunities for genuine belly laughs are overlooked in favour of a gag that provokes an easy half smile and the smallest of laughter-like sounds emanating from the throat.

Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis play a pair of political opponents running for a Congressional seat in North Carolina. Farrell is Cam Brady, the foul-mouthed, corrupt, insincere and dunderheaded Democratic incumbent whose supposedly effortless run for re-election descends into a down and dirty slugfest when two wealthy Republican businessmen brothers (Dan Ackroyd and John Lithgow) decide to run a rival candidate, Marty Huggins, who will champion their underhanded and unAmerican business practices.
As played by Galafianakis, Marty is not only a most unlikely candidate, but also a most unlikely married man and father of two. However he soon mans up when he realises just what kind of dirty game his opponent is playing, and the two rapidly descend into the politics of the gutter where nothing is beyond the pale.
There's so much material in the 2012 version of American politics to poke fun you might imagine the makers of this film would be spoilt for choice, but while THE CAMPAIGN identifies much of the material it fails to effectively exploit it. Neither the screenplay writers, nor director Jay Roach or Ferrell and co-star Galifianakis ever figure out how to unleash the potential. There's a couple of very near misses, including Brady's blatant refusal to answer any of the questions put to him at a televised debate, and some manufactured outrage at his opponent's actions, but the film seems determined to rest its laurels on the baby-punching scene.
It's the highlight clip in the trailers, creating an impression of THE CAMPAIGN as wild and crazy comedy where absolutely anything goes (it's much the same image as the one promoted of Ferrell's screen persona and one he almost always fails to live up to).
"THEY'RE PUNCHING A BABY, FOR CRIPES SAKE! WILL FERRELL IS A CRAZY GUY! HE"S PUNCHING A BABY IN THE FACE! OH - MY - GOD!"
If this is all it takes to brand a comedy as wild, crazy and out there then standards really have slipped. Yes Ferrell very graphically punches a baby but it's an obviously cgi infant which drastically blunts the impact, and later on when he punches the dog from 'The Artist' my only thought was "what on earth is that dog doing in this film? He has absolutely no reason being there."
THE CAMPAIGN makes the point that we get the politicians we deserve, and that if only we were less gullible and susceptible to irrational emotional responses to trigger words like America, Jesus and Freedom then perhaps we'd get a better quality of politician to vote for. If only that were true, and the same logic could be applied to Will Ferrell comedies this country would be a much happier place.

TOTAL RECALL: urgh!

There's just so much that's bad and sad about this Paul Verhoeven directed sci-fi blockbuster.

For starters, it's dated horribly, unless that is, the fashions and hairstyles of 1990 are enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the 23rd century or whenever exactly it is that the story is set.
Apparently we can colonise Mars and turn it into a tourist destination but we can't move beyond the mullet.
TOTAL RECALL is also an object lesson in how to lavish $65 million on a film and make it look like it cost $6500. Verhoeven's idea of the distant future (in addition to the mullet and shell suits) is shopping malls in underground parking garages and acres and acres of unpainted concrete - something you can see today in any self-respecting rundown big city centre.
And don't get me started on the acting. Schwarzenegger is atrocious but he's not alone. Michael Ironside, Ronny Cox and Rachel Ticotin all contribute generously to the sense of watching summer stock in the converted barn of a small mid western town.
The only bright spot is Sharon Stone. For the rest of the film keep your thumb firmly on the fast forward button.

THE NAKED EDGE: caution - spoiler alert!

Stick around until the very end of the closing credits to THE NAKED EDGE and, as the screen fades to black, a disembodied voice will implore you not to reveal the secret of who killed Jason Roote to anyone else.

Well - spoiler alert - I'm going to do just that. There's no other way to provide a full and honest review of this 1961 thriller.

Gary Cooper's final film is a huge disappointment – and not just because there's no nudity or edginess.

THE NAKED EDGE depends entirely upon a false premise to sustain the tension, and the frustration I felt at the final denouement simply compounded the frustration that had already built up over the course of the story.

Cooper plays George Radcliffe, an American businessman living in London who comes into a large amount of money at the same time as a work colleague is found guilty - largely on Radcliffe's testimony - of murdering their boss, Jason Roote, and stealing 60 thousand pounds.

Radcliffe uses his windfall to go into business with a slightly shady Michael Wilding, and five years later he's living in an enormous mansion and being chauffeured to work in a Rolls Royce.

Life is tickety-boo, as the English liked to say in 1961, until a letter - delayed in the mail for five years - arrives accusing Radcliffe of Roote's murder and demanding half of the money he stole.  It's opened by Mrs Radcliffe (Deborah Kerr) who's immediately overwhelmed with doubts and suspicions which her husband does nothing to dispel by acting in an incredibly shifty manner.

There's faint - very faint - traces of Cary Grant's character, Johnny Aysgarth, in 'Suspicion' in Cooper's portrayal of Radcliffe, and a strong sense of director Michael Anderson attempting to evoke that earlier Hitchcock film, but really all the two share in common is a rotten ending.

Cooper's forced to drag out the ambiguity way beyond what's plausible, repeatedly deflecting his wife's increasingly distraught questions with increasingly ridiculous evasions. Why - when he's innocent - does he try so damn hard to look like a guilty man?

Everything he does and says is intended to fuel his wife's suspicions and push her to turn him into the police. Presumably if she did he'd be able to cop an insanity plea on the basis of his performance here.

Cooper tries his best with the material he's got to work with, and given that he was suffering from cancer and would die before the film was released, he acquits himself well but it is a thankless role and surely not the swansong he would have hoped for.

If you're willing to not simply suspend your disbelief but also hang, draw and quarter it as you're jerked around by a deliberately deceitful and heavy handed plot, and are happy to be deafened by a ridiculously melodramatic musical score, THE NAKED EDGE is the film for you. For everyone else there's 'High Noon' and the chance to witness Coop at his Oscar winning best.

THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT: Benny blows a bum note

Comedian Jack Benny spent the second half of his long career poking fun at this film, disparaging it at every opportunity and mocking his performance in it.
For the longest time I believed this was just a joke and that the film wasn't nearly as bad as Jack made it out to be.
Oh boy, was I wrong.
THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT is possibly the most ill-advised project Benny ever signed up for, and I say that as a die-hard Benny fan and proud owner of every episode of his radio show.
He plays Athaneal, third trumpet player in a radio orchestra, who falls asleep during a broadcast and dreams that he's an angel sent to Earth to blow the last trumpet, signalling the end of the world, at exactly midnight. But a couple of fallen angels, who'd previously failed to do the job, are determined to stop him. Confusion ensues as the inept Athaneal attempts to complete his mission, oblivious to the deceitful wiles of his opponents.
Given the premise, the fine supporting cast (Reginald Gardner, Franklin Pangborn, Alexis Smith, Margaret Dumont, Guy Kibbee, Mike Mazurki) and veteran director Raoul Walsh at the helm, this should have been a surefire hit.
So why does the entire project fall flat on its face?
There's several reasons.
The script is terrible, the supporting cast is wasted and the comedy is lame in the extreme. Neither of the credited screenplay writers demonstrate the slightest talent for writing comedy above a fifth grade level, and it's directed with a complete absence of style. An overwhelming sense of desperation pervades every scene involving bits of business that might very - very - loosely be termed comedy, and the story's climax is so crudely constructed as to be downright embarrassing.
On their own these failings cripple the film, but what really sabotages any chance of success for THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT is the casting or - more accurately - the miscasting of Jack Benny.

By 1945 Benny's character was firmly established in the American psyche thanks to his long running and immensely popular radio show. As far as the public was concerned Benny was vain, penny pinching, petty, frequently exasperated and eternally 39 years old. He was a consummate comedian who didn't tell jokes but allowed himself more often than not to be the butt of jokes set up by the talented cast of characters he surrounded himself with on his weekly show. He could get a bigger laugh out of his patented pause than any punchline, and he was - despite his many apparent character flaws - universally loved by radio audiences.
THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT takes advantage of exactly none of these traits, choosing instead to have Benny play a thinly sketched character who looks like Jack Benny but doesn't resemble him at all. There's nothing in the part of Athaneal that contemporary audiences could identify with, and nothing in this new Benny character that's funny enough to elicit a laugh either. Why have him be a trumpeter when he was universally known as a (very bad) violin player is a mystery.
The sum total of these misjudgments is a film that's a major disappointment. I'm not surprised that Benny mocked it for the rest of his days. What else could he do? He had to have recognised it was an incredible career misstep and one which he was lucky to recover from because he didn't depend on films to sustain his popularity.
Had his radio show writers been similarly dumb enough to tamper with a winning formula we probably wouldn't remember him today as one of the greats of American comedy.