Blockbuster & Bust

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World adds up to 3 i hours of relentless overstatement. Producer-Director Stanley Kramer, a man for the big promise, conceived "a comedy to end all comedies." What has evolved after several years of preparation is $9,400,000 worth of unpalatable entertainment, more star-laden than Judgment at Nuremberg and longer (though sometimes less amusing) than On the Beach. Filmed in 70 mm. Ultra Panavision and the new seamless, single-lens Cinerama, Kramer's epic can rightly be called a blockbuster--the blocks busted or severely strained during its marathon frenzy include those of three Plymouths, four Fords, two Dodges, one Jeep, a Chrysler Imperial and a Chevrolet.

Engine trouble develops early when Jimmy Durante, as a fugitive named Smiler Grogan, goes hurtling over an embankment. Three cars and a truck stop beside the road, and out spills a lineup from Lindy's: Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney. Before he dies, Durante tells the group about the $350,000 buried in a park some 200 miles away--then, as he breathes his last, his foot flies out and kicks a bucket. Kicks a bucket, get it?

The gags go downhill the rest of the way. The mercenary motorists keep their secret from the police, and thus begins an all-day drag race through Southern California to see who gets to the loot first. Accompanying them, or sucked up in transit, are Ethel Merman, Dorothy Provine, Dick Shawn, Edie Adams, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas --and finally Spencer Tracy, of all people, as a fairly corruptible sheriff

"People following greed are funny,' says Kramer. "It's the best basis for a big chase." Maybe. But the great screen comedians--Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon Fields--lightened their essays on human folly with the inspired lunacy that makes art. Kramer offers the harshly realistic image of greed itself, and simply tops it off with wisecracks. His cast cannot match the physical style of Mack Sennett, and Mad World's substitute for wit is the flaccid humor of insult. In dozens of roadside hassles, Ethel Merman as Berle's nerve-shattering mother-in-law begins almost every sentence with "Shuddup, you big stupid idiot!"

Buster Keaton, utterly wasted in one brief sequence, might have told Director Kramer a thing or two about the shrewd use of slapstick to coax belly laughs from an episode that has three comedians tearing down a garage with all the deadly, humorless efficiency of a professional demolition crew. Cutting from incident to incident, car to car, ground to air, the film dissipates its fun at every turn, and the only chase to build up steam is a Chase named Barrie, who dances a wicked deadpan twist. Mad World reaches its nadir with an abortive climax that puts Spencer Tracy and ten comedians atop a fire ladder reeling several stories above the street, presumably on the assumption that eleven men suspended in mid-air will be eleven times funnier than Harold Lloyd used to be. Alas, the law of diminishing returns prevails.

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