Fun with Dick and Jane

This is certainly my favorite show for both George Segal and Jane Fonda. They are marvelous as folks trying to make ends meet (by hook OR crook) in the face of unemployment. Their hijinks are marvelous, as they exhaust ALL the possibilities for humor in the search for employment.

Especially memorable are the fashion show, the celebratory dinner, and the performance of Carmen. But good spots in this film are too frequent to even cite!

Fun With Dick And Jane has George Segal and Jane Fonda as this upper middle class suburban couple living the American dream with their son Sean Frye. It all comes to an end when aerospace engineer Segal gets fired by his unctuous and smarmy boss Ed McMahon. Owing a lot because they're keeping up appearances in their neighborhood it all comes crashing down. After trying other ways to get an income and failing, Segal and Fonda turn to a life of crime. Though they have many setbacks, they begin to like it.

Watching Fun With Dick And Jane put me in mind oddly enough of dealing with World Trade Center families at Crime Victims Board who were a lot like Segal and Fonda. Working in the Towers for various wealthy companies when the male breadwinner was taken away, these families in most serious way were in the same kind of trouble this family was. That lifestyle can be expensive. John Dehner who was Fonda's father may be a self righteous creep, but there is a grain of truth in what he preaches at them about spending on luxury items.

McMahon who America knew for decades as the announcer and boon companion of Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show turns in a really good performance. He's a guy you learn to hate more and more as the film progresses. There's a great cameo part from Dick Gautier as a crooked televangelist Fonda and Segal rob. That should almost be legal.

With all the humor Fun With Dick And Jane is an interesting social critique and commentary on American values. It even got a remake in this new century. I'll have to check it out to see if it is as good as this one.

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.

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 ****