Get to Know Your Rabbit

I think I first ran into this film on cable. Later, I paid over $18.00 for a VHS copy.

Tonight, in a fit of nostalgia I decided to search for a DVD copy and found, to my dismay, that there are none.

Guess I'll have to nurture my VHS copy until I can transfer it to a DVD for preservation along with HBO's 'Disco Beaver From Outer Space', 'The Traveling Executioner', 'Run For the Sun', 'On The Run', and 'Looping'.

Some excellent films are very, very hard to find.

The Smothers Brothers were a very popular comedy team on television in the 60's. This film and 'Pandemonium' in 1982 set Tommy apart as he performed alone with wonderful results.

Not great films...but a lot of fun to watch. And you'll watch them more than once!

'Get to Know Your Rabbit' is far from a great movie, but it's a quirky film that tells an unusual story in an original way. Best of all, there's a very sexy performance by Katharine Ross, plus good performances by Orson Welles and several other cast members. I'm surprised that this hasn't become a cult movie. (One of the cast members is Allen Garfield: there seems to be an unwritten commandment that every movie with Allen Garfield in the cast must develop a cult following.)

Rising young executive Donald Beeman (Tommy Smothers) abruptly decides that high wages and corporate prestige are not what he really wants, so he quits his job with high-powered boss Turnbull (the brilliant John Astin) and sets forth in a new career as a tap-dancing magician, mentored by the mysterious Dell'assandro (Orson Welles, giving one of the best performances of his career as a dodgy parlour-tricks conjuror: a role which is clearly dear to Welles's heart). Dell'assandro tutors Beeman in the rules of magic: the title of this movie is one of his trade secrets.

There aren't a lot of job opportunities for tap-dancing magicians, so Donald performs his act in seedy little nightclubs and juke joints all over the country. The production quality is slipshod all through this film: throughout the movie, Donald is supposed to be performing in many different venues, but it's obvious that all of these sequences were filmed on the same set. The idea of someone tap-dancing and performing magic tricks both at once is very funny, but this film drops the gag. In one sequence, we see Dell'assandro (played in this shot by Welles's body double, with his back to the camera) tutoring a roomful of students in the dual art of conjuring and tap-dancing simultaneously ... this would have been very funny if Welles's double and the others were actually tap-dancing: instead, they're just clomping up and down in crude unison while they do some very simple tricks with handkerchiefs and rings.

While Donald takes his act on the road, he meets a gorgeous young woman who takes a romantic interest in him, and vice versa. She is played by Katharine Ross, who is meltingly beautiful here ... and wearing one of the sexiest outfits I've ever seen on any woman, anywhere, in any film. The only flaw in her outfit is a ridiculous pair of floral-print hot pants: she'd look a lot sexier if she got rid of those hot pants. (Phworr!) Ross gives a good performance but her role is badly and thinly written. Her character doesn't seem to be a person in her own right: she only seems to exist to fulfil Donald's romantic fantasies of having a girlfriend. The fact that Ross's character has no name (she's listed in the credits as 'the terrific-looking girl') only emphasises the skimpiness of her character.

John Astin gives a brilliant performance, hilarious and yet touching, as Donald's boss whose business fails after Donald's departure, and who attempts to start his executive career all over again with only a desk and a paper clip. The scene in which Astin explains the significance of a paper clip to Tommy Smothers is truly a splendid piece of acting, with Astin balancing comedy and pathos remarkably. When I met John Astin (at the dedication ceremony of the Lucille Lortel Theatre, in New York City) he told me that this was one of his favourite roles.

There are good performances by George Ives (whom I fondly recall from the 'Mister Roberts' TV series) and King Moody in small roles, and a splendidly deadpan performance by Bob Einstein (the under-rated brother of the over-rated Albert Brooks). There's also a very fine performance by veteran character actor Charles Lane as Smothers's father. Lane gave small but gem-like performances in a huge number of important films (the opening shot in 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' is a close-up of Charles Lane ... and that one shot is Lane's entire part in the film) but he gives one of his best performances here. Unfortunately, Tommy Smothers is only barely competent as the story's central character. Smothers was never one of my favourite comedians, yet I recognise his considerable skill as a comedian and a musician. But he's no actor, and the casting of Smothers in the lead role seriously compromises this movie.

I usually dislike Brian De Palma's movies, due to his penchant of 'borrowing' images and devices from much more talented directors. 'Get to Know Your Rabbit' is one of De Palma's more original efforts, and so it's one of his better films. (I've heard an unconfirmed rumour that De Palma directed less than half of this film.) There's one pretentious camera angle early in the movie, pointing straight down from the ceiling of Donald Beeman's flat, to show Tommy Smothers as a prisoner in a labyrinth ... but it raises a laugh and it's valid to the character on screen.

Katharine Ross is incredibly sexy in this movie, but she has almost nothing to do except stand there and look sexy. I'll rate 'Get to Know Your Rabbit' 4 points out of 10.

A guilty -- but perhaps not all that guilty -- pleasure. A small comedic indie made by Brian De Palma way back in his Greetings and Hi, Mom! days, it still retains a charming, if somewhat adolescent, absurdism. Tommy Smothers plays a corporate dropout in a loveless relationship who yearns to become a tap-dancing magician, taught by none other than Orson Welles's Mr. Delasandro in full pretentious mentoring mode. Add Katherine Ross as the adoring new girlfriend, Allan Garfield as a brassiere maker in search of his perfect woman, and especially the wonderful John Astin as a laid off executive-turned-derelict-turned-executive and you have the sort of bizarre, off-kilter type of fun movie you would have seen as a college student at some midnight showing in theaters during the late 60's/early 70's. Innocently subversive.

And can any movie that bills (correctly) an early Katherine Ross as "Terrific-Looking Girl" be all that bad?

In this review I am going to mention recreational drugs, Please don't construe my mention as an endorsement. It's actually an historical reference.

I first heard of "Get to Know Your Rabbit" when it was released in 1972 (the year that I turned 20). The buzz on it was strong at the time. It played in some select theaters and college campuses for a limited time and POOF! Vanished. It was always the one that got away.

I waited for 50 years to see it when it finally aired on TCM. Were I to rate it from the vantage point of the 21st century I'd probably give it two stars. Had I rated it in 1972 it probably would have gotten (at least) 8 stars.

Once upon a time it was fun to get high with a group of friends and stumble into a movie theater. We'd sit there with saucer-like eyes as we marveled at "2001," "Fantasia" (which Disney re-released in that era), "Yellow Submarine" or other mind-blowing films. I remember a couple of guys that I knew sitting all day through repeated showings of "Patton" while high.

Under such circumstances the surreal non-sequiturs of "Get to Know Your Rabbit" would have been hailed as riveting. Now? Meh.

This movie is firmly rooted in the time and culture of its release. I would only suggest checking it out when you've mastered time travel.

Ironically, Brian De Palma's GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT... an anti-corporate, counter-culture comedy... is a lot like the previous decade's I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S'ISNAME, and both feature Orson Welles, first as a boss who doesn't want to lose his top young employee and here a magic instructor that this film's star, Tom Smothers of Smothers Brothers fame, takes lessons from after quitting his job as executive John Astin's problem-solving underling...

Welles has a total of ten-minutes screen-time, and upon graduation asks Smothers' Donald Beeman if he had been like a father to him, wherein Tommy's expression... the signature dimwitted naiveté more of an irked, stonewall glib... shakes his head, "No" which is one of several problems since this offbeat character, played by an offbeat comic actor on his own, doesn't seem game for this particularly strange and completely random road comedy...

Replete with episodic beyond plot-driven scenarios, especially from Smothers (turned into a sex symbol here) bedding various hot girlfriends, from moody nymph Susanne Zenor to perfect magician's assistant Katharine Ross... and yet no matter who or what passes through... from quirky character-actors Allen Garfield to M. Emmett Walsh but mostly the corporate-comeback-seeking Astin... RABBIT gets weirder for the sake of not being typical...

Which it's obviously fighting against as director De Palma was still in 1960's hippie-dropout GREETINGS to HI, MOM mode before resurrecting Hitchcock-horror beginning with SISTERS the next year... plus there's a relaxing quality to Smothers, a pretty good pawn if lazy leading man, going from location to location... but since everything's so extremely surreal, it all winds up feeling rather ordinary and mundane somehow.