First Family

Sometimes I awake in a cold sweat screaming, the nightmare always starts the same... I am watching First Family. This movie is so bad nearly twenty years later I am still upset at its mere mention. A waste of a great cast and an idea that while not academy award potential had some promise. My vote for worst movie ever...

First Family is a waste of time. It has a couple of funny moments, but thats about it. Buck Henry directs Bob Newhart, Harvey Korman, Rip Torn, Richard Benjamin, Fred Willard, Bob Dishy and two of the funniest ladies who ever lived Gilda Radner and my personal favorite movie actress of comedy Madeline Kahn. Ironically they play mother and daughter and in real life were only 5 years apart in age. Another sad thing is they were also very good friends and died of the same disease ovarian cancer just ten years apart. They deserved to be given a better script worth their extraordinary talents. On Saturday night live they were given better scripts. The only reason to watch this is because its the only film they ever made together. They could and should have been a female comedy team. But this is all we have.

This morning they were playing old Howard Stern interviews on Sirius and one of them was with Gilda Radner, and sadly every time I see or hear her I'm reminded of this train wreck of a movie. We were four couples all devoted fans of the cast members and Buck Henry and forty years later we are all still scarred by this atrocity. Sometimes we hear the phrase, "A one-joke film", if only… In the Trivia caption of this movie it was said that the ending was rewritten because of negative feedback from audiences. The beginning and middle should have been rewritten, although I don't know that the ending we saw could have been worse. I believe that most of the other reviewers are in agreement that what makes this film so bad is the waste of the talents of these fine comedians.

One reviewer stated that this was the only movie he ever walked out on. We too were tempted, but I think we were hoping for something redeeming to save The First Family, sadly that was not to be.

This had the potential to be a great movie. The cast is first rate, Buck Henry CAN write a good script (though he didn't do it here), and the basic idea is sound. But the storyline is bad. (Even a comedy has to have a interesting plot that makes sense.) And the script is weak, with too many unfunny scenes and jokes. That's really the bottom line: this movie just isn't funny. It's a shame, because this is a first-rate cast. Bob Newhart is one of my all-time favorite comedians. Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner, Richard Benjamin, Fred Willard, Harvey Korman, and the rest deserve better than bathroom jokes. Newhart is the best thing in the movie. He's actually quite believable as the president of the United States. Usually, fictional presidents are played by the same type of actors: Hal Holbrook, Gregory Peck, etc. The mild-mannered Newhart is a nice change of pace. I wish someone had really written a solid, funny script for him. With the right material, either in a movie or a sitcom, Newhart could be a very funny fictional president. I hate to keep belaboring the point, but this movie was bad when it came out of the typewriter. Bad script equals bad movie. Still, I don't hate watching it, because of Bob Newhart. As I watch it, I keep imagining the better movie that COULD have been.

To me, the first half is funny as heck. Overall, the White House antics amount to a perceptive spoof of scarcely managed turmoil. That exchange between mother Kahn and daughter Radner over upholding appearances even though the repressed Radner's hormones are bursting is poignant in a satirical way. And catch the punctured dignity balloon among diplomats at the UN. It's delicious.

But once second-half events move to black people's country of Gorm, the screenplay loses footing. Of course, by today's standards the spoof's racial side flirts with incorrectness, which may account for the sudden erratic uncertainty. There are still amusing moments, but the screenplay appears to thrash around with no clear direction. And the less said about the ending, the better.

Anyway, the cast amounts to a collection of TV all-stars, from Newhart to Willard to Radner. In fact, there's probably too many stars, such that vivid talents like Kahn don't get nearly enough shtick. Likely, producer-director-writer Henry was aiming at a Mel Brooks type burlesque, but only partially succeeds. All in all, White House subject matter remains a ripe target for satire, but needs better consistency than this one.