It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

TCM's 50th Anniversary screening ofIt's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
at the Cinerama Dome on April 28, 2013.
Photo: Edward M. Pio Roda/TCM

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) is 50 years old this coming November!  I recently attended a 50^th anniversary showing of Stanley Kramer’s epic comedy at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, California where I’d seen it during its premiere run as an eight-year-old kid.  Prior to the show, Mickey Rooney, Marvin Kaplan, Barrie Chase, and Kramer’s widow Karen Sharpe Kramer reminisced about the movie and its place in cinema history.  Mickey Rooney kept interrupting the others with insightful comments like “Oh! And let’s not forget Spencer Tracy!”  Karen Kramer showed off her purse made from a Big W coconut.  Marvin Kaplan described what it was like to work with Jonathan Winters.  An empty chair was left for Winters who had planned to attend but had died just weeks earlier.  I got a chance to talk to a number of fellow audience members about the film and was pleased to find that, like me, many consider IAMMMMW (for lack of a better abbreviation) to be among their very favorite movies.  Now, I admit it’s not a great classic and there are certainly much funnier comedies.  Nonetheless, there is something very unique and special about it.  So many aspects of the movie are outrageously, audaciously over- the- top. Yet, like all Kramer movies, it never loses sight of its deeper, richer themes.  Let’s take a look at how IAMMMMW pulls off this feat akin to juggling elephants.

Sid Caesar, Edie Adams and Stanley Kramer

Director Stanley Kramer had a reputation for making some of Hollywood’s best Message Movies.  His movies took on the big, topical subjects of the day and presented them with excellent casts, intense drama, and just plain fine filmmaking.  The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) are hard-hitting dramas on racism, nuclear war, creationism vs. evolution, fascism, and inter-racial marriage respectively.  His idiosyncratic casting often put actors in roles far outside their comfort zones such as Tony Curtis in Defiant Ones, Gene Kelly in Inherit the Wind, and Judy Garland in Nuremberg.  The story goes that a colleague told Kramer that he could never make a comedy.  Kramer bet him that not only would he make a comedy but it would be the biggest comedy ever made.  Another story is that after all the heavy dramas, Kramer wanted to make “something a little less serious” (which is also the title of an early draft of the screenplay and the title of a 1991 tribute documentary). 

********SPOILER ALERT********

If you haven't seen the movie, stop reading now, go rent the movie, and laugh your head off.

The story and screenplay were written by William Rose (who had written several comedies for Ealing Studios including The Ladykillers(1955)) and his wife Tania.  What’s striking about the story is that it’s not at all funny.  After a horrific car accident, the dying driver tells a group of strangers the location of $350,000 he’d buried in a park in fictional Santa Rosita many years before.  The strangers and their traveling companions race hundreds of miles to the park leaving a trail of destruction while being closely monitored by the police.  They dig up the treasure only to have it confiscated by the Santa Rosita police chief who has had one too many disappointments.  When the group realizes the chief is stealing the money for himself, they chase him to the top of a condemned building and onto an unsafe fire escape.  In the chaos that follows, everyone is badly injured – and none of them gets the money.   What fun!  What’s more, the screenplay has very few punch lines, the characters are not at all likeable, and much of the dialogue is abusive, demeaning and insulting.   So where’s the comedy, you ask?  Hang on.

Kramer cast his epic comedy with a roster of entertainment’s best comedians:  Sid Caeser, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters (in his first film role), Phil Silvers, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine, and Terry Thomas.  He filled the smaller parts with a parade of talent from 40 years of showbiz including Jimmy Durante, William Demarest, Andy Devine, Carl Reiner, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Don Knotts, Peter Falk, Jim Backus, Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan, Norman Fell, Joe E. Brown, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, Ben Blue, Zazu Pitts, and Edward Evert Horton. For good measure, cameos appearances include Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Stan Freberg, and the Three Stooges.  Oh! And let’s not forget Spencer Tracy!  Kramer cast one of Hollywood’s greatest stars in the pivotal role of Captain Culpepper.

How many comedians can you cram into a movie?
Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Jonathan Winters, Dorothy Provine, Terry Thomas, Dick Shawn, and Eddie Anderson

With this astounding collection of comedians, it would be easy to go for a lot of cheap laughs (see Rat Race (2001)).  While there are plenty of gags, Kramer plays it dead serious with his characters’ greed.  As a result, they come to life in amazing ways.  Milton Berle’s edible seaweed-salesman J. Russell Finch is a meek, hen-pecked lamb who finds his inner lion when goaded by Terry Thomas’ Priggish Englishman Col. Algernon Hawthorne. Sid Caeser’s reasonable dentist Melville Crump becomes insanely unreasonable when his ambitions are literally locked up.  Jonathan Winters’ furniture hauler Lennie Pike, a naïve boyish bear of a man, becomes a force to contend with when doublecrossed.  Ethel Merman’s Mrs. Markus is the purse-wielding mother-in-law from hell who never stops railing on the others (which is absolutely essential for the movie’s final joke).  Dorothy Provine’s Emeline Finch is the only character who doesn’t get caught up in the frenzy to find the money – until she’s the first to discover its location.  Who else but Phil Silvers could have made Otto Meyer such an sleazebag?  Dick Shawn’s cool-cat Sylvester Marcus becomes comically aggressive when he thinks his momma has been accosted.  Buddy Hackett’s mumble-mouthed Benji Benjamin takes more than his share of abuse.  Peter Falk’s tightly-wound taxi driver, Don Knott’s nervous bystander, Kaplan and Stang’s doomed gas station attendants, and Jim Backus’ drunk “It’s the only way to fly” pilot are fully fleshed out for the short time they’re on screen.   But it’s Spencer Tracy’s Captain Culpepper who adds the essential element of human tragedy to what could have been just a silly farce.  As the race to the Santa Rosita Park progresses, we keep coming back to this “good cop” whose long-awaited moment of triumph and his own moral fiber are being eroded by the dysfunction of his family and city politics.  By the spectacular finale, Culpepper has literally gone to the dogs.  Without all the ‘Mad’ness, IAMMMMW is a dark, complex human comedy with rich characters and dozens of story arcs.

Stunt Pilot Frank Tallman flies through the billboard. 

As for the ‘Mad’ness, the movie delivers.  In fact, several critics at the time felt that the movie was too chaotic, leaving the viewer overwhelmed and exhausted.  Not me.  I love the rapid-fire action, visual jokes, and crazy stunts.  Smiler Grogan’s car “sails right out there.”  The cars race down the winding mountain highway.  The biplane bounces into the air.  Lennie rides the girl’s bicycle before he demolishes the gas station.  Otto Meyer floats down a river in his convertible.  A plane flies through a billboard, a hanger, barely misses the control tower, and crashes into a cafeteria on landing. Melville destroys the hardware store basement with a sledgehammer, a forklift, a shelf of paint, a blowtorch, fireworks, and “a couple pieces of small dynamite.”  There’s the hunt for the Big W, the taxi chase through Santa Rosita, and the finale with all the male characters flying off the firetruck ladder.  Sprinkled throughout are hundreds of jokes and gags: Smiler Grogan literally “kicks the bucket”, Col. Hawthorne’s does a pratfall at the end of his first scene, Lenny swings from the taxi’s open door, and, of course, Mrs. Marcus slips on a banana peel to deliver the movie’s catharsis.

Poster and LP cover art by Jack Davis
(click to check out the amazing detail!)

Holding all this Madness together is the Academy-award nominated score by Ernest Gold.  In scene after scene, the music sets a light and fun tone while providing the momentum for the action on the screen.  For example, during the scene where the five cars are driving down the mountain, a happy, jaunty little theme speeds up and slows down with the cars. Later, when Benjy declares that it’s “every man for himself”, the music matches the speed and recklessness of the ensuing race.  A merry-go-round-like theme plays every time one of the cars makes a U-turn.  When the groups arrive at Santa Rosita Park, a new theme is tentative and stealthy.  As the search gathers momentum, the little theme breaks out into a full-blown march.  The Big-W has its own theme, an ethereal vocal chorus that actually sings “Biiiiig dooou-ble-yoooouuuuuuuu.”  The “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” waltz theme has silly lyrics by Mack David in the seldom-heard overture and just before the intermission but it really busts loose for the body-flying fire truck ladder finale.   *Sigh* I really miss big, bold sound tracks like this one.

The Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 with
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Kramer needed the widest screen he could get for his big, broad comedy.  One of the widest screen formats was Cinerama which uses three separate images projected onto a 146° curved screen with a 2.59:1 aspect ratio.  How the West Was Won (1962) is one of the few fictional movies made in this format.  IAMMMMW began production in Cinerama with its premiere planned for the brand new Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.  But early on, Kramer switched to Ultra Panavision, a 70mm format with a 1.25 anamorphic squeeze which results in a 2.76:1 aspect ratio.  Ben Hur (1959) was made in Ultra Panavision to spectacular effect.  For comparison, Cinemascope is either 2.55:1 or 2.35:1 aspect ratio (depending on the audio tracks), 70 mm formats (Todd-AO and Super Panavision) are 2.21:1, and wide screen televisions are 1.78:1.  As the premiere approached, the folks at Cinerama approached Kramer with a proposal to make his Ultra Panavision movie look good at the Cinerama Dome.  The image was “rectified” to add a gradient squeeze that increases from the center to the sides of the image.  When projected on the curved Cinerama screen, the rectified image looks correct.   The result was marketed as one-projector Cinerama but wide-screen purists will tell you it’s just not the same as three-projector Cinerama. 

Ultra Panavision was rectified to look good on the curved Cinerama screen.
Source: American WideScreen Museum

The squeeze on the ends can be seen in this rectified 70mm frame.
Source: American WideScreen Museum

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World premiered at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood on Nov. 7, 1963.  It was a huge success making $46,300,000 at the domestic box office.   The film won an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing and was nominated for five other Oscars.  Following its Cinerama premiere and 70mm roadshow, the full image would be trimmed to a 2.55:1 ratio for the 35mm general release. The 2001 and 2003 DVD releases of IAMMMMW are made from the 35mm version and therefore don’t show the entire original frame.  One shot that clearly shows the trim is at the Big W where everyone looks down into the hole shown from the hole’s point of view.  The faces on the sides are clearly truncated compared to the faces on the top and bottom.  Fortunately, the 2011 Blu-ray release has the original 2.76 aspect ratio restored, allow us to see the whole frame for the first time in decades.

The 2.55:1 aspect ratio from the 35mm elements on DVD cuts off the sides.

The restored 2.76:1 aspect ratio on new Blu-ray shows things we haven't seen for decades. 

The aspect ratio trim is nothing compared to what happened to the length of the movie.  Rumor has it that Kramer’s first cut was over 5 hours long.  The preview version ran 210 minutes but was quickly cut by Kramer to 192 minutes for the premiere version.  During the 70mm roadshow, United Artists cut the film to 161 minutes to squeeze in an extra performance.  The 35mm general release version is 154 minutes not including overture, intermission, and exit music and is now considered to be the standard version of the film.  The DVD releases and the new Blu-ray release present this 154 minute, standard version.  In 1991, with Kramer’s participation and Tania Rose’s endorsement, 20 minutes of lost footage was restored in a “Special Edition” released on VHS.  Some fans want to see this special edition on DVD but I disagree.  In my opinion, the restored footage is second-rate and adds very little to the story (with one exception: Ray and Irwin survive the gas station destruction).  Though preservation efforts continue, the premiere version is probably lost for good including a scene in which Culpepper calls Jimmy the Crook (Buster Keaton) to arrange a one-way boat ride to Mexico.  A 70mm standard version is used at revivals, including the one I saw in Hollywood.  The overture, the intermission music and the exit music are all restored.  During intermission, radio calls from police tracking the ongoing action are played.  One of these calls adds a bit of story:  Col. Hawthorne and Russell hitch a ride on a beer truck to the car rental agency.

The California Incline in Santa Monica is one of the many
So. Cal. filming locations that are fairly easy to find.

After 50 years, the obsession with this movie continues.  On the Web, you can find a detailed analysis of the extended version vs. the standard version, virtual tomes of filming location information, and endless debate on whether the movie is funny or not.  On this last point, both camps are right.  On the surface it’s a very funny movie – one of the funniest.  But under all the jokes and chaos is something darker.  It’s the best movie about greed since, well, Greed (1924).  I guess Kramer couldn't resist making something serious after all.

IMDB, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

Wikipedia, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 

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