Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title

One of the weirder things I've seem on TV. Turner Classic Movies has been showing some rarely seen stuff lately and some of the movies are gems.

I certainly wouldn't call this a gem by any means. I mainly turned it on just to see why I'd never heard of it before. First I thought I turned on TV Land by mistake. Most of the cast of The Dick Van Dyke Show is in this. I noticed there was no laugh track when Morey Amsterdan cracked a one liner and something seemed missing. That sent me to IMDb to investigate. I then watched simply because of the cameo appearances in the movie.

The movie has a lot of sight gags and wise cracks. A bit like an over length 3 Stooges episode and it does have Moe Howard in one of his final screen appearances.

This movie is about a girl who inherits a bookstore, and the "wacky antics" of her employees. This movie definitely plays on the cold war mentality and fear of espionage of the time, but for laughs. It features some of 1960's television, and 1930's film's greatest stars (Supporting cast of the Dick Van Dyke show, Moe Howard of Three Stooges fame, Milton Berl, Steve Allen, etc...) Chock full of one liners (pretty much the whole movie is set ups for one liners), it takes what would make a 30 minute sitcom hilarious, and makes a 90 minute movie annoying. This movie is really quite goofy. HOWEVER, I really think a kid might find it quite funny...and by kid I mean under 10 yrs.

Seeing all the cameos is a nice trip down nostalgia-lane for the over 40 folks, if you are not interested in a plot, a script, and acting talent.

Even by the dismal standards of mid-1960s spy spoofs (others have titles like "The Last of the Secret Agents?" and "The Maltese Bippy"), this is a forlorn little comedy, shot on Desilu sets and looking like a quickie TV show. Every Desilu TV star on the lot that day puts in a witless cameo (Irene Ryan, Danny Thomas, Carl Reiner); the rest is Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, Buddy Sorrell and Sally Rogers in all but name, exchanging lame repartee as a bumbling pair of friends to a nubile bookstore owner (the conspicuously untalented January Jones), all of them caught up in labored international intrigue. Amsterdam co-wrote the screenplay and thus has only himself to blame, but he and Rose Marie look distinctly unhappy amid the low-budget surroundings, and the movie's reputation as a legendary stinker is well deserved. Harmon Jones, who actually has a good movie or two to his credit, directs in a grab-the-paycheck-and-run style that's winceworthy.

This was a lost film for decades, until someone at Turner and United Artists resurrected it for a few TV showings. Apropos of all the other reviews here, unless you enjoy 60s culture as viewed by middle-aged men of the period, the movie will leave you at a loss. Morey Amsterdam, who co-wrote and produced, and Rose Marie are alternately embarrassing and silly. Morey's one-liners were dinosaurs on the vaudeville circuit and would have been rejected immediately for the Alan Brady Show. A low-budget and unfunny pastiche of bad jokes that simply painful to sit through. However, there is some amusement in seeing Richard Deacon try in vain to rise above the material. A few of the cameo roles are of historical interest. A bomb at the box office when first released in 1966, this film is best left in the vault.

This had a long reputation as one of the worst movies ever made, though few had actually seen it. It took me until the winter of 2007 to catch up with this one, and while by no means a good movie, it is at least an interesting one. I understand that the backstory behind this low budget production was that The Dick Van Dyke Show was wrapping up, and a few of its stars put together an independent movie. Morey Amsterdam produced, co-wrote, and starred, along with Rose Marie and Richard Deacon. As insurance, he filled his script with jokes, and filled his movie with cameos. Its plot about spies and espionage does not hold together, but now, after 40 years, the movie works on another level. The plot is dated, the stars and cameos are very much from another era of showbiz, and the jokes are of the irresistibly corny variety that have also faded into memory. So now the film is a quirky little cultural artifact of sorts. It is not good cinema, but in the wake of the Police Academy series, Dude Where's My Car, and Freddy Got Fingered, it can hardly be called among the worst movies ever made. It is offbeat, silly, dated, and, if you're in the right frame of mind, rather fun, especially if you have an interest in the era, or fond memories of it.