There’s a desperate quality to the title of
Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; a miscalculated belief
that the strenuous repetition could pound the underlying movie into the desired
comic nirvana. Plainly it didn’t work out that way – the film (which is
propelled by a dying man’s revelation of buried treasure, heard by five men who subsequently race against each other to get to it first, drawing in other participants along the way) has
few actual laughs or notable comic invention, but a vast (or let’s say, a mad,
mad, mad, mad) amount of yelling and shrieking and bickering. It’s sometimes
fairly handsome at least, with much of the action taking place against imposing
scenic backdrops, and of course some ideas land better than others, if only through
sheer effort (Jonathan Winters contributes to a fair percentage of those; Ethel
Merman to none of them, although of course that’s a matter of taste, if such a
term can possibly be applied here). Perhaps the most intriguing, if underdeveloped,
element is the withering vision of marriage and male-female relationships in
general; among other things, Terry-Thomas’ English interloper character has a
strange digression about the emasculation of the American male, and one of the
wives comments in apparent seriousness that her dream, if she had most of the
money for herself, might be to use it to get into a convent, but it goes no
deeper than that. Spencer Tracy (playing a detective who’s been after the loot
for years) is given more space than anyone else to build a more complexly
motivated character, but he hardly seems fully present (which does at least
provide some contrast to the all-too-present central cast). The array of cameos
only means that the movie existing on the margins (Buster Keaton turns up for about
a minute, the Three Stooges for a single shot) often seems to carry greater
potential than the one at the centre.
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