Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen DUCK SOUP A REALLY FUNNY HOME MOVIE HENRY JAGLOM'S Sitting Ducks is a schleppy film about a couple of schlepps. That's what makes it funny. Neither the film nor the characters in it have...
...The move has no significance, in fact...
...He had to make his film on a low budget with a minimal crew and unknown actors, and he's not trying to hide the fact...
...Commonweal: 308...
...The title, for instance, is one of the details that the film flubs...
...Where Simon is beefy, Sidney is scrawny...
...Jaglom throws in a scene where Sidney and Simon have to walk through a flock of poultry in a farmyard...
...On the contrary, he's proud of it...
...I think he just improvised the rest...
...A scene that has very much this feeling for me, that feels impromptu and impulsive, is one where Sidney jumps into a bathtub with Simon, who is understandably non-plussed by the move...
...Sitting Ducks is made out of just the sort of stuff you find in home movies—a little melodrama, a little pornography, a little cutting up and acting crazy—and somehow it manages to sustain that spark of spontaneity which can give home movies their appeal...
...Jaglom's direction of the movie is as sloppy, as weak on details, as his two heroes' execution of their robbery...
...The advantage this gives him is that it allows him to make up his story as he goes along...
...At the end there is a little coda where Michael Emil, Zack Norman, Patrice Townsend and Richard Romanus swim by one of those underwater windows in a swimming pool and take a bow...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...After the plot has already arrived in...
...and it is apt in more ways than one...
...That's the feel that Sitting Ducks has—the feel of a home movie, one that turned out really funny, to everyone's surprise...
...His is the sort of personality one would expect an accountant to have...
...He has a premise, which is that Sidney and Simon pick up the other characters during their trip...
...This little homage Jaglom pays to his cast is no doubt deserved...
...This last is what gets him into trouble because it tempts him to rip off his employer, who happens to be the Mob...
...I could hear people around me in the audience remarking on the transparent wrongness of details like these, though perhaps they aren't so recognizable or distracting for audiences farther from Long Island itself...
...but as they scatter, honking, before the approach of the two men, we realize that Jaglom has gotten a bit confused...
...Then come the two female leads, whose symmetries balance those of the film's heroes...
...Like all accountants, he is conservative, precise, fastidious, rigorous, and has a heart full of larceny...
...Either way, I'm not sure Jaglom cares...
...It's a road film...
...This symbolic little episode only makes sense if the birds in it are ducks, of course...
...More dangerous still, it tempts him to enter into a conspiracy with Sidney in order to pull this caper...
...In short, they are Mutt and Jeff, or Crosby and Hope...
...Where Simon lies low and keeps mum, Sidney brags and struts...
...They are Jenny (Patrice Townsend), a loose woman who's been abandoned by her current lover, and Leona (Irene Forrest), an up-tight waitress who walks out on her job...
...Simon is the sort of man who plays it safe...
...He seems to know from the beginning that the only way this movie can succeed is the way its characters succeed with their robbery—by sheer enthusiam, by, overcoming obvious ineptness with irrepressible charm...
...It's just the sort of thing people shoot with their home-movie cameras when they're traveling on vacation...
...First there is the odd-man-out, Moose (Richard Romanus), an itinerant musician whom Sidney hires as a chauffeur...
...The truth is that Jaglom sometimes seems to be flaunting the inconsistencies in his production, the tell-tale signs of the cheapness and haste with which it has been made...
...It just seems to be a moment of nuttiness that somehow got loose in this film...
...I have the feeling that Jaglom's cast developed a rapture of the road, and that he just kept making up new situations that would follow the flow of this reality...
...Having grabbed the money, the partners take off for Florida in a limousine, and their misadventures along the way make the film what it is...
...Neither the film nor the characters in it have much class, much sense of style...
...The heroes of this story are Simon (Michael Emil) and Sidney (Zack Norman...
...Florida, there is a scene at a bar where Jaglom begins outside with a shot of the neon sign, which is in the shape of Long Island...
...But in this film, just as the locations seem to have been happened upon rather than scouted or planned, so do the episodes give the impression of mere chance...
...Maybe he should have changed the title to Cooked Goose, just to be consistent, to make his film look at least a little professional...
...We do get the general idea, though, and it is still specific enough to make us realize that the details are all wrong in another way too— geographically . Although the boys are supposed to be en route 23 May 1980: 307 from New York to Miami, the allusion to duck-farming confirms the impression we get in a number of other ways that almost the entire film was shot on Long Island...
...Sitting Ducks isn't really a heist film any more...
...He's glad to let it show and with a certain fecklessness, an insouciance of the kind that can't be bothered with details, he even tries to point this fact out...
...With a skimpy budget and crew, the difference must not have been great between the driving around the production company was doing in order to make the film, and the driving around the characters were supposed to be doing in order to make their escape...
...The latter is more like it because once the two heroes have pulled their robbery...
...He's shot the scene with geese instead of ducks...
...Where Simon has both feet on the ground, Sidney is off the wall...
...They ought to make a few hundred sequels, just as Hope and Crosby did...
...In a spirit that has more to do with a one-man band than auteurism, Jaglom has written his film as well as directed it...
...Irene Forrest takes her bow standing in front of the window and watching the others because, a title informs us, she can't swim...
...Jaglom and his cast ought to keep on trucking...
...It leads to no new developments—no overtones of homosexuality, for example—in the story...
...So the style and the content are perfectly . matched, and the result is an unexpected success...
...All road films tend to be episodic by nature...
...He gobbles vitamins, goes in for body-building, and shows in assorted other ways that he has a passion—indeed, a phobia— for self-preservation...
...Beyond a sense of how these characters should be introduced into the plot, however, my guess is that Jaglom was open to suggestion...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
