No robarás a menos que sea necesario

George Segal and Jane Fonda are not he kind of actors you would expect to find in this movie with low brow humour that is a delightfully guilty addiction. Dirty jokes, a rancid social commentary and the glib life of bad mid to late 1970's economics drive 'Fun With Dick and Jane' to a level of crime that makes you root for them. Three scenes stand out. Watch for them! One has Segal practicing his stick up routine in the mirror dressed totally in black with a nylon wrapped over his head. Another one has Fonda visiting her conservative parents to ask for financial help and her father turning her down with an evangelical sermon and Dick and Jane's first stick up at a cheap motel. This movie has some slapstick that is hard to resist.

I love this movie! I saw it with my mom in '77 and even though I couldn't have possibly gotten all the jokes and double entendres, I loved it. Seeing it now (I own it on VHS; they don't put movies like this out on DVD all that often), I love it even more.

Everything about it positively SCREAMS mid-1970s, from Dick's Thunderbird with the 600-feet-long hood to Jane's clunky Mercury Montego wagon to JANE FONDA WEARING HER JEANS ROLLED UP TO JUST BELOW THE KNEE TO SHOW OFF HER BOOTS! If you're a 70s afficianado, you can't help but love the time capsule that this movie represents. Another big bonus is the guy who played Schneider on One Day at a Time, who here plays a loud contractor with a big bullhorn.

As others have noted, the movie is also a time capsule to an era when it was not only OK, but funny to slam African Americans, Hispanics and especially gays. It was a little painful to see George Segal be so homophobic, but I choose to see this as a reflection of how far society has leapt in the last 25 years.

I've read elsewhere that Jane only made this movie for the $ to support then-husband Tom Hayden's political campaign/career. Even still, the late 1970s was Jane's era, in which she cranked out gem after gem, from the Electric Horseman to an incredibly bitchy role in The California Suite to a powerful performance in The China Syndrome.

All in all, FWDAJ is a funny time capsule that has a few messages, but don't be mislead by posters here who say it's a thinly-veiled moralistic movie. IT IS NOT! It's a fun romp, nothing more or less.

PS: Remember when they sold those things called record albums, the sleeves of which could conceal a gun during an attempted hold-up?!

Consistently funny spoof of America's caste system from bottom to top. The Harpers (Fonda &Segal) are yuppies trying to hang on to middle-class status after Dick is fired from well-paying aerospace job. Increasingly desperate as creditors close in, they eventually turn to robbery, a clumsy Bonny and Clyde with country club credentials. Their early lame stickup efforts are particularly humorous.

There's no mistaking the subtext that takes a shot at about every rung on our economic ladder, from minority welfare cheaters to middle-class status seekers to upper-class hypocrisy. And throw in a shot at televangelist hucksters guarding their own loot. A couple points are easily overlooked. Note how Jane's wealthy dad refuses to help, lecturing them on the virtues of rugged individualism. Tellingly, this is the one scene without a humorous overlay. Note also that Dick's thanks for helping get a man on the moon is to get fired. Thus, it's declining profits, the logic of capitalist efficiency, that prevails over all else. Essentially, what storybook Dick and Jane find out is what it's like to survive on the margins, and since their tastes are elevated, it's an inflated margin.

Don't get me wrong. Thanks to both an excellent script and ace performances,the movie manages its many serious points in consistently humorous fashion. After all, we never expect Dick to actually use his stickup gun. He's too humorously inept, though he does get more skilled as time goes on. And catch how the now destitute Dick and Jane live in a rambling home with a bombed-out lawn and a pit for a pool. Now what will the neighbors say.

Big kudos to Segal who handles his difficult role in expert fashion, and also to Fonda who makes a perfect bickering soul mate and for being maybe the first woman to take a discreet leak on screen. McMahon too shines as the slick company president who smiles even while stabbing a guy's back. As an actor, he certainly proves he's more than Johnny's affable TV sidekick.

Anyway, in my little book, the 90-minutes succeeds on a number of levels, making it both really watchable and still relevant.

It's a sign of the times (i.e., the 1970s) when Dick and Jane rob the telephone company at gunpoint and all the customers applaud. It's distinctly un-PC now, but very funny back then. As usual, it's a "Jane Fonda movie" that thinly conceals a social message underneath its comic scenario, but I didn't feel it got too preachy until near the finish-line. George Segal works very easily with Fonda, and there are some hugely funny scenes after an arduous opening wherein Segal loses his cushy job. The desperation of unemployment is touched upon briefly (for a comic effect), but there are some stabs at social commentary that do not work (as with two bad caveats involving a transsexual and a man with no vocal chords). But for every foul ball there comes along something fresh and groovy, like the sequence where Fonda acts her way out of neighborhood humiliation once the gardeners start rolling up her lawn, or when the gentleman from Food Stamps shows up at an inappropriate moment (a ritzy family dinner) confessing he just had a Big Mac and a Coke. **1/2 from ****

Fun with Dick and Jane serves as an entertaining satire on the upper middle class standards of living, produced in the presumably stifling corporate environment of the mid-1970's. A drunken Ed McMahon lays off overpaid executive George Segal. Lovely wife Jane Fonda, who handles matters fairly well when their landscapers tear up all their unpaid work, finds herself forced to find some source of income to maintain their expensive lifestyles – it would seem Segal's unemployment only takes them so far. Fonda secures a job as a model while Segal manages to lose his benefits when a gay unemployment officer spots him working as a bit character in the opera. When Fonda loses her apparently not very secure job, the now poor couple head out to get a loan. There they stumble upon a holdup, get taken hostage, and somehow wind up with all the loot. Enjoying their first taste of crime, the pair bungles their way through a series of hold-ups and eventually become near pros. They manage to restore their house to its previous splendor, cockily inviting McMahon to a chic pool party so he can have a gander at their newfound success. Of course, a sip only gets you thirsty, so the greedy couple find themselves faced with the quest for the Big Gulp. The story is funny for the most part, with memorable moments akin to Segal discussing music with a record store clerk during a robbery. There's healthy dose of anarchy for good measure, with destruction happily joining hands with the nouveau pauvre and the will to get back what has been lost. By having its characters steal primarily from the allegedly greedy or malevolent – the phone company, loan sharks, the Climax Court Motel – the film does maintains some shaky moral standards. In addition, Fun contains a few instances of dated racism, with jabs at homosexuals, Hispanics and African-Americans (who hold a pajama dance party in McMahon's office as Segal and Fonda crack his safe, their loud drill protected by the celebrants' louder music). A startlingly racist part goes to Hank Garcia, as an unemployed cleaner who works a bad influence on Segal. Nevertheless, the film on the whole manages to function well as a thoroughly entertaining comedy, with an ample dose of anarchism for good measure.