Touche pas à mon gazon

When the executive engineer Dick Harper (George Segal) is unexpectedly fired by the president Charlie Blanchard (Ed McMahon) of the Taft Aerospace, company where he works, his wife Jane Harper (Jane Fonda) and him get completely broken, full of debts including the mortgage of their fancy house and without means to support their lifestyle. Dick unsuccessfully tries to find a new position, while Jane looks for a job and cuts their costs to the minimum. While using the insufficient unemployment paycheck of the social security to survive, they contract a loan in a bank. There is a heist in the bank and Jane accidentally steals some money from the thieves, and the couple decides to robber to survive and maintain their social status.

"Fun with Dick and Jane" is a great amoral comedy that has not aged or dated. The politically incorrect story is delightful and very funny, and is a sharp critic to the American Dream, satirizing the hypocrite need of maintaining a status and also to the corruption related to the big business of the corporations. Jane Fonda is very beautiful and shows a great chemistry with George Segal. This is the first time that I watch this movie, which is an excellent entertainment. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Adivinhe Quem Vem Para Roubar?" ("Guess Who Is Coming to Robber?")

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 ****

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?!

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.

In these trying times, when American's financial world is going down the drain, and the dreams, aspirations and livelihood of millions of Americans are evaporating, a film like this one is just what a despairing audience needs. The story of the American Middle Class in jeopardy and is aptly personified in this movie, called 'Fun With Dick and Jane.' There have been several other films based on this theme, but for my money, the stars of George Segal and Jane Fonda are solidly entrenched and not easily replaced by later film couples. Segal stars' as Mr. Richard Harper a Aero-space executive who as his boss (Ed McMahon) states is the very best at his job, but like so many other corporate executives is no longer needed. His position is one which promised security, but has fallen on hard times. Thus he soon learns he is unemployed. The fun begins when Harper and his wife try to adjust to the downward spiral of economic descent. They like so many Americans take what they can get and object poverty is not attractive at all. Thus, when the bottom is ready to engulf them, they turn to a life of crime. Can they do any worse? Not being prepared, they soon realize, they are not cut out to be white collar criminals and decide to quit. That's when opportunity beckons once again. A great movie and one fitted to our time. ****