Enter Laughing

A few months ago, after the death of Carl Reiner, TCM ran a programming tribute to him of some of the movies he directed, including Enter Laughing. It's airing again tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM as part of the salute to Star of the Month Shelley Winters, so I recently sat down to watch it and review it here.

Although Shelley gets second billing, she's not really the star here, having a smaller role. She's Emma Kolowitz, matriarch of a New York Jewish family in 1938 with husband Morris (David Opatoshu) and son David (Reni Santoni, who is the real star of the proceedings). David is a recent high school graduate, and a huge fan of Hollywood movies, especially actor Ronald Colman. He has a girlfriend Wanda (Janet Margolin), but also eyes other women. And he's got a job working in the machine repair shop run by Mr. Foreman (Jack Gilford), although he always seems to be preoccupied with things other than work, much to his boss' consternation.

One of the things David is interested in is becoming an actor, although he's never really done any acting before and doesn't have all that much ability for it. Mom wouldn't hear of it anyway; she wants David to go to pharmacy school and learn a nice, respectable profession that will also pay the bills. But David has learned about a community theater that currently has auditions for the latest play they're running, so David signs up.

This is actually a pretty threadbare operation, even more so than the traveling theater we saw in Exit Smiling. Actor Harrison Marlowe (José Ferrer) is the owner, with his daughter Angela (Elaine May) being the lead actress, and Pike (Richard Deacon) serving as stage manager. Mr. Marlowe and Pike see quite clearly that David can't act, but that doesn't dissuade Angela. David's the right height, and reasonably nice looking, so she begs Daddy to cast David in a small part. Dad eventually relents.

And then David learns just how threadbare an operation this is. David gets a "scholarship", but that only means he's supposed to chip in $5 toward the running of the place instead of the regular $10. And the role he has requires him to wear a tuxedo, which he's supposed to provide for himself. Not that David has one, and the cheapest one he can find, not being able to afford anything better, is extremely ill-fitting.

Meanwhile, Angela seems to be in love with David, which presents him some problems in his relationship with Wanda. Worse, however, is that Mom finds out how David is spending his extra time and money, and she's pissed. Acting is just not respectable, and she went to so much trouble to get the money to send David to pharmacy school. So she starts putting the stereotypical Jewish mother guilt trip on David.

Eventually, after many twists and turns, we get to the opening night of the play, and David's big scene, which almost doesn't come off considering the quality of David's acting. But this being a comedy, everything ends up relatively happily for most of the characters.

Enter Laughing is for the most part a pretty funny movie, although there were a few times when I felt it was crossing over from funny to manic and needed to be toned down. Carl Reiner let Shelley Winters go way over the top toward the end, for example. On the other hand, Richard Deacon is quite good in his supporting role. Michael J. Pollard also shows up as David's friend, who seems to serve the role of comic relief, since I don't know why else he's there.

Enter Laughing doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.