THE SCREEN: Estival Festivals
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN ESTIVAL FESTIVALS In comedy, nothing succeeds like excess. All the origins of comedy are in festivals, where the whole idea is to carry things .to excess, to blow off steam....
...In Heaven Can Wait, by contrast, things are kept much more lively...
...That's because there was no reason for me to tell you...
...But tmlike Hitchoock's hero, Dudley Moore thinks the woman is there to score...
...Heaven Can Wait runs over with them a fair amount of the time...
...In the end perhaps the difference between Heaven Can Wait and Foul Play is not just a matter of pacing, but of personalities...
...The reason that Heaven Can Wait moves in so many different directions at once, and therefore moves faster, is that each character is pretty...
...Each has an independent course of action he's embarked upon...
...You drink too much, dance too long, stay up too late, and find life in general fuller, riper and therefore funnier than it really is...
...They do...
...When a midget turns up at her door selling Bibles, she thinks, wrongly, that he's one of the weirdos who've been trying to kill hec, so she throws him out the window...
...In Foul Play, however, even large details, like the stars, could go unnoticed...
...In the scene with the midget, first Goldie gets him out the window, then she knocks him off the sill, then he falls in a barrel and rolls away, then we get a point-of-view shot from inside the barrel, then he hits a bump and flies up in the air, then in a separate shot he comes down again...
...You remember that one-about the attempt to assassinate some statesman during a concert at the Albert Hall, and the man (Jimmy Stewart) who found out all about it from a dying stranger...
...Into this plot Foul Play's writerdirector, Colin Higgins, throws bits and pieces of other Hitchcock movies, and then he tries to make it all funny by diverting the action into various comedies of errors...
...Well, in Foul Play it is a woman (Goldie Hawn) who knows too much, and the assassination is to take place at the San Francisco Opera House instead of the Aibert Hall...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK,JR...
...The fact that no one except him can see the angel of death and the floorwalker doesn't simplify matters, either...
...eH defined...
...Almost every gag in the movie tries to work the same way, by getting expectations and results out of kilter...
...This scene is from Hitchcock's The 39 Steps in which the hero is picked up by a woman who behaves similarly at his apartment...
...While he's waiting for his new body to become available, however, he's enticed into taking up residence in the body of an eccentric millionaire who is about to be murdered by his secretary (Charles Grodin) and his wife (Dyan Cannon...
...By the time Commonweal: $Jl the film gets to this point, which doesn't take long, it has so many levels of misapprehension going for it that there's hardly time to squeeze in all the consequences...
...The very gesture or line that bursts all the dams of laughter is often the one that was most incidental, least expected, least essential...
...In every scene, events go askew like this...
...She gives him a .quick rebuff and leaves...
...When she term around once the coast is clear, she finds him stripping, projecting a dirty movie and turning all manner o~;erntica exotica out of his closets...
...She gets him to take her up to his apartment, where she then lurks about the windows to see whether her pursuer is still outside...
...Except for that difference, and the fact that one movie is therefore funny where the other isn't, the two are pretty much alike...
...This is why comedy is often done best by a whole team of writers--because you've got to have more than enough to make the gags work at all...
...In Foul Play, on the other hand, the talents of Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, who plays a cop, are wasted...
...In this one a football player (Warren Beatty) has been prematurely snatched from life by the angel of death (Buck Henry), so that now a floorwalker up in heaven (James Mason) has to find him a new quarterback's body to finish out his allotted days in (his old one has been cremated by the time the mistake is discovered...
...But the complications don't pile up fast enough to be really funny...
...They aren't simply reacting to each other like the characters in Foul Play...
...Both are based on old material--Heaven Can Wait on an Ernst Lnbitseh film of the same title, Foul Play on a pastiche of Hitchcock plots--and both are romances about two people who fall in love when peculiar circumstances bring them together...
...But only Heaven Can Wait has both...
...Higgins parcels them out at one to a scene and tries to stretch his material instead of compounding it...
...That the makers of Heaven Can Wait understand this, while the maker of Foul Play does not, makes all the difference between them...
...Along with pace, misapprehension of this sort is the key to comedy...
...You see, you didn't even know Chevy Chase was in Foul Play, did you...
...I said at the beginning that what makes a comedy is the details, the byplay, in it...
...Both films also seem to grasp the fact that comedy depends on disparity, on the misalignment between what one person intends by his actions and what another understands from them...
...Only a situation that's going in twenty different directions at once will have this sort of detail, this byplay, which can put us right over the edge...
...When the stranger is trying to tell her that he's dying and what she should do, she thinks he's talking about the movie they're at...
...Deadly...
...The result is that the conflict between Beatty and Cannon is a personality conflict on top of everything else--a mismatch between a coper and a schemer...
...The upshot is moments like the one when the millionaire's cannon is fired, as it is every night as the flag is lowered in the garden, at which his other Cannon (Dyan), who is understandably on edge these days, screams and jumps out of her skin as if she has been goosed, whereupon Beatty lopes by in the hall and says "Hi" as if nothing had happened...
...18 August 1978:532...
...This allows Cannon and, especially, Beatty to put their comedic talents to good use...
...Basically Foul Play is a re-make of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much...
...You've got to have gags to burn, gags to throw away...
...In one scene, for instance, Goldie Hawn picks up Dudley Moore in a singles bar because she is being chased by someone...
...What ought to be funny here is the disparity between her behavior and his, the mildness of her reaction (because she has more urgent matters on her mind) as opposed to the elaborateness of his preparations...
...Meanwhile, Beatty is only sticking around because he's in love with Julie Christie (how she figures in the plot is just too hard to explain) and so he can keep in shape while he tries to get back into the game...
...Cannon and Grodin are somewhat unnerved by the fact that her husband survived their first murder of him, but they forge ahead with a new plan while Grodin tries to keep her off the sauce and it becomes obvious to us all that they're going to betray each other the minute something else goes wrong...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 16
