It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Made at a time when Hollywood was trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of audiences switching to the small screen with the weight of history, lavish production values and thousands of extras in Cinemascope blockbusters such as 55 Days at Peking and Cleopatra, both of which were released the same year as It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Stanley Kramer’s film applies the bigger-is(hopefully)-better principle to the cast list by shoe-horning onto the screen every big name comedian the director could persuade to get on board this over-the-top and mercilessly overlong slapstick chase movie.

The film was a huge hit in its day and one can imagine audiences lapping it up but by the same token the cavalcade of superannuated big screen stars like Mickey Rooney, Ethel Merman, William Demarest, Terry-Thomas and Edward Everett Horton as well as a large assortment of popular comedians of the small screen like Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Don Knotts, to name but a few gives the film even for its own time a feeling of self-congratulatory irrelevancy (it was released a few days before the assassination of President Kennedy ushered into the world a very different kind of madness).

The plot, which involves a gaggle of people in a road race to get to a cache of buried loot, is nothing more than a pretext for a nearly continuous string of physical gags, most of them featuring mayhemic destruction. Keeping tabs on them is Spencer Tracy spoofing his character in Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) as the police chief who is also on the trail of the money.

An anomaly in Kramer’s oeuvre which to that time had largely concentrated on social issues, the film has a certain historical value but taken in itself is only very intermittently funny and, as with the scene in which a poor black couple gets run off the road losing their worldly possessions, by today’s standards at least, occasionally completely unfunny, either as physical comedy (a lot of which underwhelms because stunt doubles are so clumsily used) or, even less so, for its verbal wit.

 

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