The end, but not of the blog

In the nine months since I moved and have been able to do the whole streaming thing, I've mentioned how PlutoTV seems to be quite good at allowing you to do on-demand viewing. Another of the movies that I watched on Pluto because of the interesting premise was the Burt Reynolds comedy The End. I figured that with today being the end of the year, it would be an appropriate day to finally do my post on the movie.

Burt Reynolds stars as Sonny Lawson, a Los Angeles real estate man who at the beginning of the movie is seeing his doctor, Samuel Krugman (Norman Fell in one of many cameo roles the movie has). Dr. Krugman has some bad news for Sonny: Sonny has a blood disease that will kill him in somewhere from three months to a year. Sonny is quite displeased with the idea of dying, as he's fairly young and expected to live quite a bit longer yet.

Sonny becomes obsessed with the idea of dying, tailing funerals, talking to a priest (Robby Benson in another cameo), and eventually visiting a hospital to see if he can get a more up close look at what death is really going to be like for him. That last visit frightens him enough, and this was the days before euthanasia, that Sonny decides he wants his life to end on his terms, rather than suffering in an ICU or some such. As a result, he decides that he's going to kill himself.

But how? That, and he still has to tie up all his personal affairs like his will and dealing with a complicated personal life that includes oblivious parents (Pat O'Brien and Myrna Loy); an ex-wife (Joanne Woodward) and a somewhat estranged daughter (Kristy McNichol); and a girlfriend (Sally Field). After finally getting those affairs in order, he kills himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The end.

Well, not quite. Sonny does try to overdose, but he doesn't take enough to kill him, with the result that his lawyer has him committed to a sanitarium of the sort you'd see in old movies like The Cobweb. One of the doctors (Carl Reiner) happens to be terminally ill himself and tries to assist Sonny in trying to come to grips with his impending death, ultimately doing it by dropping dead right in front of Sonny. Talk about dark comedy.

And among the patiens is Marlon Borunki (Dom DeLuise), someone who's criminally insane in that he hears voices like a schizophrenic, with one of those voices having told him to commit murder. So when Sonny tells Marlon how he's terminally ill and tried to commit suicide, Marlon has the logical-for-him idea that perhaps he can help Sonny die. But Marlon's efforts don't work -- hospitals dealing with mental patients have all sorts of anti-suicide measures in place -- and Marlon's efforts eventually bring Sonny to the point of thinking that perhaps letting the illness take its course instead might be the better option.

As I said, The End is quite the dark comedy, something that for the most part would fit in well with the George C. Scott movie The Hospital. Unfortunately, however, the movie really begins to falter once Dom DeLuise shows up. He's just a bit too zany for the movie's good, and one or two scenes with him would be more than enough to get the point. However, he fills probably the last third of the movie if not more.

Still, there are going to be people who appreciate Dom DeLuise, and for them they'll probably like all of The End, and not just the first half like I did.