Un monde fou, fou, fou, fou

...since I first saw this movie in 1963 when it opened in my hometown of Salt Lake City, UT. I was 14 years old and went with a church group. The theater where it played did fund raisers for local churches and I remember my mom giving me money to go, which seems like about $1.00. The theater had a big curved; I think was called Cinerama but not sure now.

Anyway, I was so taken with IAMMMMW and it had been playing a while and I saw that it was playing at a different theater; smaller and farther away but it didn't matter. I saw it there at least twice.

I think the next time I saw it was after I was married in 1973 and VHS tapes hit the market. I had a copy of it on VHS and then moved on to DVD when that came about.

I know that in a box someone in my garage, I have about 40 DVD's of movie I love. Whether I'll dig out IAMMMMW since it's available online in several places.

Anyway, I've read about it and talked to others about it and it just dawned on me that for a long time Carl Reiner was the last living cast member. And now, as of 6/29/2020 there are none of the major stars around.

I love IAMMMMW. I know there's some slow parts and things that don't make sense. Doesn't matter to me....

Well, if I named all the famous comedians who were in this film it would a long, long review. Just check the credits - it's unbelievable! Suffice to say, it was an "all-star" cast of everybody you could think of who was a big-name comedian in 1963 including some old-timers like Mickey Rooney, Milton Berle, etc. Add a famous dramatic actor, Spencer Tracy, to the mix,, too, and you have one of the most famous comedies ever put on film.

When I saw this in the theater, and even in the '80s on tape, I liked it immensely, but now it's just a bit loud and too much for me in spots. I'm either getting too old or this film is getting to look dated and corny.....probably both. However, if you want three hours of pure lunacy and escapist fare, you could do a whole lot worse.

Despite all the shouting, this film has some of the all-time most memorable comedy scenes ever put on film. Plus, unlike today's comedies, there is no profanity, no sex, no blood....just silliness and one wild scene after another, with an unbelievable slapstick ending atop a building.

For anyone who collects movies, or enjoys a good laugh, this a "must" for your collection, and I don't say that very often. However, as I get older, all that yelling and screaming has made me downgrade my rating from 10 to 9 to 8 and now 7.

A couple of years ago, I finally managed to get IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD on video. I saw it as a kid and remember enjoying it but watching it again for 40 years later, I still found myself LMAO. This is still the granddaddy of all comedy/adventures directed by Stanley Kramer, who up to this point had only directed serious dramas like THE DEFIANT ONES and JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG. A dying man (Jimmy Durante) who was thrown from a car that careened over a cliff, tells a group of witnesses to the accident (Sid Ceasar, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters) that there is $350,000.00 hidden under a big "W" in a nearby town, which sets off one of the wildest, craziest chase comedies made in the history of cinema. A rather tired and haggard looking Spencer Tracy heads the cast as the cop on the trail of these greedy money-mongers and just about every comedian or comic actor alive in 1963 appears in this film, either in a starring role or cameo and despite this impressive gathering of the best comedic talent in the business, towering over all of them in one of her few film performances, is Broadway legend Ethel Merman, who gives the performance of a lifetime as Berle's shrew of a mother-in-law. Her performance alone makes IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD worth seeing. Check out this classic if you've never seen it.

This was the first time a comedy got the "epic" film treatment and after getting increasingly pretentious in his previous two dramas, Stanley Kramer just went all out for simple old-fashioned fun with the largest ensemble of comic talent he could get his hands on. How big? Consider that this is a film in which both Jack Benny and Rochester appear, but not together (also true of Phil Silvers and his "Sergeant Bilko" nemesis Paul Ford). Just about every big name in TV comedy of the 50s and 60s is here and the results, while not the greatest of its kind ("The Great Race" is a funnier film in my opinion) still manages to deliver the laughs.

It's too bad the remaining ten minutes (plus the police bulletins intermission) of the road show version still is missing, because the expanded version helped me appreciate the film a lot more than I did the first time out when I saw it on TV as a faded pan and scan atrocity. This is one film that makes great use of the widescreen.

I saw this film for the first time when I was seven or eight -I don´t remember it exactly. What I do remember is that it made me spend one of the funniest whiles in my life. At that time I didn´t know very much about the actors: except for Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney and possibly Peter Falk (who had already come into my heart as Lt. Columbo), I didn´t associate their faces with their names. Now I have a much better information about each and every one of them: Berle, Caesar, Hackett, Merman, Shawn, Thomas, Winters and all the rest. What I´ve always regretted is that I´ve never got to see the unabridged version of the movie: it lasts more than three hours and the prints that I´ve always watched last only two and a half hours. Nevertheless, I think this is one of the most amusing films I´ve ever seen. It seems obvious that the traces left by the greatest comedians of the silent period or the early talkies -Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton (who makes a cameo appearance in the film)- are present here in this picture. From the moment you see the amazing credits created by Saul Bass and hear Ernest Gold´s tremendous score, you know there´s something great coming in. Everything is perfection into the genre it belongs to: all that happens with the cars, the destruction of the service station by Winters (who looks like a raging bull in an antique dealer shop), the plight of Caesar and Adams in the basement of the hardware store, the scene of the pilot-less plane, Shawn´s attack against Berle´s and Thomas´s rented car...and oh, yes, the pursuit of Tracy! Well, in short, this film goes to show that in this mad, mad, mad, mad world there are many people who would do ANYTHING for money. I hope that someday I can see the integral version of this movie: I´ve seen it a hundred times in video, I know it by heart and I never get tired. The big W stands for WONDERFUL!