What did I say about Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear?

Another of the movies that I watched when I was looking for something on the Watch TCM app that was just about to leave the app was Start the Revolution Without Me. I didn't know much about it beyond the synopsis, but watching the opening credits, I noticed it was another collaboration between Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, who are probably more famous for TV shows like All in the Family. Seeing their names gave me reason for trepidation, as I'll discuss in a bit.

After the opening credits, we get some opening narration from Orson Welles that little things can have great effect on history, and that this is the story of one of those little-known little things that might well have changed the course of the French Revolution. Flash back to a couple of decades before the revolution....

The Duke Di Sisi and his highly pregnant wife are on their way to Paris during the reign of Louis XV. for some reason it's important to them to have the baby at Versailles, but they're not going to make it in time, so they stop in some small village. Unfortunately, there's another woman, Mrs. Coupé, who is about to give birth as well. Worse for the doctor is that both women wind up giving birth to twin sons. And, the midwife is negligent in keeping the twins separated and identified. So the doctor decides to do the least bad thing, which is to mix up the twins, so that each couple will at least get one of their biological children. And, after all, the idea of fraternal twins would have been well known even then.

Fast forward to 1789, as the voiceovers tell us in interminable detail. The Coupés, Claude (Gene Wilder) and Charles (Donald Sutherland) were orphaned and live by their wits, although Claude is revealed to have a girlfriend. Philippe (Gene Wilder) and Pierre (Donald Sutherland) Di Sisi are neurotic brothers living on the family estate in Corsica, well away from Paris where the revolution is about to come.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Louis XVI (Hugh Griffith) seems more worried about tinkering with his clocks while his wife Marie Antoinette (Billie Whitelaw) is involved in various sorts of international diplomacy. Louis suspects something might be up, so he sends for the Di Sisi brothers. However, Louis' advisor and all-around henchmen the Duke d'Escargot (Victor Spinetti) realizes this is a good opportunity to act against the King and get the Di Sisi twins out of the way. So he intercepts the letter and starts a plot of his own.

Unfortunately, the peasants are revolting, and have a plan to steal a barge full of weapons. As part of the plan, the Coupé brothers are supposed to be sacrificed. Things go wrong, and somehow that Coupé brothers wind up in a carriage headed for Versailles, where they're taken in as the Di Sisi brothers, albeit wearing peasant garments as some sort of disguies. The real Di Sisi brothers, meanwhile, have to go back to the commander of the peasants and try to figure out a way to survive.

The combination of the "which twin is which" plot along with a sort of Trading Places storyline ought to make for a lot of comic opportunity. However, in watching the other movies that Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear made together, I had the same thinking. All of those wound up having some good points, but being fairly uneven movies, with the whole being less than the sum of its parts. I'm sorry to say that I found myself getting the same impression with Start the Revolution Without Me. Some of the jokes are just run into the ground, and the Di Sisi brothers are just made too nuts. Orson Welles does the best he can with his limited material, and fortunately for him he gets the least wacky material which allows him to deadpan things. The movie also has some nice production values, having been filmed entirely on location in France.

Some people will probably like Start the Revolution Without Me more than I did, so definitely watch this one and draw your own conclusions.

Young Frankenstein

In the 14 years that I've been doing this blog, it seems that I've never done a post on Young Frankenstein. It's been in the FXM rotation recently, and will have two airings tomorrow (Mar. 14), at 4:00 AM and 1:10 PM. So, since I had recorded it during one of the previous FXM showings a few weeks earlier, I made a point of sitting down and watching it to do a post on now.

Gene Wilder plays Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, pronounced FRONK-en-steen, thank you very much, an instructor at a medical school in something close to the present day when the film opens. At least, everybody looks like they're from the 1970s, and references are made to it being the 20th century. During one of his lectures, a man who's clearly not a medical student comes into the lecture hall and wants to see the good doctor after the lecture. It turns out that Frederick is the grandson of Victor, the Dr. Frankenstein who worked on reanimating the dead and created the famous monster (never mind that it just being a grandson, this means the dates don't work out at all). Whoever has owned the Frankstein estates in Transylvania has just died, and Frederick being the closest living relative, he's bequeathed the properties. So he leaves his fiancée Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn) behind and sets out for Transylvania.

Transylvania, for no good reason, seems trapped in the 19th century. There don't seem to be any cars and almost no electricity other than what the Frankenstein castle is able to produce. Also, everybody speaks German, which might have been more likely during the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but certainly not by the Communist era. Frederick is met at the train station by Igor (pronounced EYE-gore, thank you very much), a hunchbacked assistant, who takes Frederick to the castle. Also in the wagon waiting for Frederick is Inga (Teri Garr), who is intended to serve as another of Frederick's assistants.

Running the household is Frau Blücher (Cloris Leachmann) who, it turns out, wants Frederick to continue the work of previous generations of Frankensteins, even though he's also considered himself a serious doctor. She lures Frederick into the laboratory, where he finds all the equipment now covered in cobwebs. But finding Victor's private journal, he's suddenly curious as to whether Victor's procedures actually work. He and Igor obtain a corpse but need a preserved brain. There's the brain of a prominent local scientist, but Igor has an accident and winds up bringing back an "abnormal" brain instead.

Dr. Frankenstein is able to reanimate the corpse, but the living corpse, once again dubbed Frankenstein's monster (Peter Boyle), has some serious problems. He can't speak, and has a pretty severe fear of fire. He also doesn't want to be chained up, leading to unintentional violence. The townsfolk, led by police inspector Kemp (Kenneth Mars), remember Victor's work, and they understandably don't want another monster running loose. To complicate matters for Frederick, he falls in love with Inga despite being engaged to Elizabeth, who sends a telegram to inform Frederick she's coming to Transylvania.

Young Frankenstein is a Mel Brooks movie, and how much you like it is going to depend upon how much you like Mel Brooks' style of humor. For me, I find that when it works, it works really well, but when it doesn't, it can be extremely irritating. As such, I found Young Frankenstein rather uneven. The bits that were more directly parodying Universal's horror movies of the 1930s worked well, such as the monster's scene with the little girl, and another scene with a blind hermit (Gene Hackman). Others, like a running gag about mention of Frau Blücher's name being accompanied by horses whinnying, fell flat. I prefer some of the other movies from Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, but also understand that a lot of people are going to love Young Frankenstein.

The Woman in Red

I bought a DVD set of four unrelated 80s comedies some time back to get a copy of Throw Momma From the Train. I hadn't seen any of the other three movies at the time I picked up the set, and got through them very slowly. I recently finally watched the last of them, The Woman in Red.

Gene Wilder, who directed as well as adapting the screenplay from a 1970s French movie, plays Ted Pierce, an adman in San Francisco who, at the start of the movie, is standing on a window ledge as though he's about to commit suicide. He wonders how he got to this point, and realizes that it started several weeks back. Cue the obligatory flashback....

Ted was driving into work one morning, parking his car in the basement of the parking garage below the building where he works. Just before he can get out of the car, he sees a young woman walking through the basement, stopping on a grate and imitating the famous Marilyn Monroe scene from The Seven Year Itch. Ted is intrigued by this, because what man wouldn't be intrigued by a beautiful woman who has that sort of incident with her skirt. Of course, Ted also happens to be married to Didi (Judith Ivey) with kids at home.

It turns out that the woman is a model, Charlotte (Kelly LeBrock), who's part of an ad campaign in the next office over for San Francisco's cable cars. But the bigger point is that her being in the next office with just a floor-to-ceiling glass divider between them is going to give Ted more time to look at this lovely woman. Eventually, he does decide to try to meet her, by calling the extension in the next room.

But for most of the movie, things go badly wrong in Ted's attempts to hook up with Charlotte. The first time around, even though it looks like Charlotte is the only one near the phone, another woman, Mrs. Milner (Gilda Radner) answers it and takes up Ted's offer of a date. And then one of Ted's friends, Joe (Joseph Bologna), is caught having an affair and dumped extremely unceremoniously by his wife who takes everything but the house. But Ted's friends are still willing to help him.

Complicating matters is the fact that up to this point, Ted has always been extremely faithful to Didi, which makes you wonder why he'd suddenly think of stepping out on his wife with this woman. There's also the question of what's going to happen when the affair gets found out, because surely there's no way he can keep it a secret if he is actually able to hook up with Charlotte. And Charlotte has some secrets of her own....

The critics back in the 1980s didn't give The Woman in Red the best of reviews back in 1984, and it's not difficult to see why. Much of the movie seems like a strung-together collection of gags that don't quite work put together. Worse, Ted is supposed to be a nice guy, and yet here he is doing something that's fundamentally mean to his wife. And we're supposed to root for him.

The Woman in Red is probably better known for its soundtrack, or more specifically one song off that soundtrack. Wilder was able to get Stevie Wonder to do the soundtrack, and among the songs is the Oscar-winner "I Just Called to Say I Love You", which is way overplayed on those soft rock and "greatest hits of all time" radio stations to this day.

I can think of a lot of Gene Wilder movies I'd recommend before recommending The Woman in Red.