Cold Turkey

This comedy is 30 years old, but with today's cries about NO SMOKING it is relivant, and FUNNY! Dick Van Dyke is a riot along with Bob and Ray, and the rest of the "characters" from a small town. The town, led by van dyke , the local preacher, try to quit smoking for 30 days to win a 25 mil$ prize, offered by a tobacco co. for any town that can stop smoking. This film needs to be on DVD. FOR anyone who ever tried to quit "Cold Turkey" , this film will bring back memories, whether you succeded or not.

Fantastic movie comedy -- easily one of the best satires of American life ever put on film. Norman Lear wrote and directed this gem just before moving on to "All In The Family". "Cold Turkey" and "All In The Family" are his two greatest creations. It begins with the script. It's funny from beginning to end. The script has clever dialogue, inventive ideas, an eye for detail. I can't do it justice. Just see the movie. The cast includes many of my all-time favorites, including Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart, Tom Poston, Barnard Hughes, and Jean Stapleton. You'll see a lot of people you recognize from other movies and sitcoms of the 1970s, including many who turned up on "All In The Family" and other Lear shows. "Cold Turkey" is also the best movie showcase for possibly the greatest comedy team of all time. Bob & Ray are brilliant satirizing newscasters of the time, like Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Paul Harvey, and Hugh Downs. If you're not a Bob & Ray fan, hopefully this movie will make you one. Randy Newman's soundtrack is terrific. If it ever came out on a CD, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. And it helps that the movie, which is set in a small Iowa town, was actually filmed in a small Iowa town, rather than some Hollywood backlot. It gives the movie a feeling of authenticity. This movie should have been on the AFI 100 Best Comedies list. See it.

Knowing full well that it could never happen, a major tobacco company offers a multi-million dollar prize to any town in the USA that will quit smoking for an entire month.

What the company doesn't expect is the little town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, and the Reverand Clayton Brooks leading the distressed town to prosperity with the much needed money as incentive.

The film, the work of TV sit-com legend Norman Lear, is a savage satire of the American tobacco industry, as well as the TV news community (Comic Ray Goulding appears in one scene as "Walter Chronic" in a parody of TV news anchor Walter Cronkite, with a florescent lamp behind his head, forming an angelic halo).

Many people in the film later went on to become notable television actors, and it's a delight to see how people become so easily unhinged when they're deprived of their nicotine fix (this from a happy non-smoker)!

Bob Newhart plays an odd villain in this film. A strange role for a man so associated with playing meek roles is cast as a rather icy consultant for the tobacco giants.

An underrated film that is worth another viewing, if only to have a snicker at the tobacco industry or see the town of Greenfield, Iowa used as a backdrop.

I can't understand why a film with such big names, both in front of and behind the camera, is not available on DVD. Is there a conspiracy? Does "Big Tobacco" not want anyone to see this? I understand this is a "niche" film, but c'mon, surely there is a small distributor willing to pick up the rights and get this into the hands of the people? Dick Van Dykes name alone should be enough to warrant a release, along with Bob Newhart and Norman Lear. I guess that unless there are some big, firey explosions or gratuitous nudity (not that there's anything wrong with that)then something isn't worthy of a DVD release. This is a well-acted and scripted satire of the culture of smoking and gives great insight into how smoking was treated 35 years ago.

... and that is really no surprise since this film was written and directed by Norman Lear, architect of so many hit TV shows in the 1970s.

Bob Newhart plays Merwin Wren, a tobacco executive who pitches the idea of giving 25 million dollars to any town that gives up tobacco for one month. He figures this will redeem the image of the tobacco industry, and what town could get every smoker to give up smoking for a month?

Enter tiny town of four thousand, Eagle Rock, Iowa. It lost a major employer and people are leaving town. The military has said that Eagle Rock is at the top of the list to receive a new missile manufacturing plant, but they have to spruce up the town's infrastructure first. But how, with a diminishing tax base? So, encouraged by the town's preacher, Clayton Brooks, the town takes the pledge.

Wren's job is on the line if Eagle Rock succeeds, so he goes to the town to try and get just one smoker's foot to slip. Meanwhile, tobacco withdrawal hits the entire town hard with comic results. If you've ever watched a loved one go through such withdrawal, this will look familiar to you. The first half of the film is about the comic attempt to stop smoking. The second half is about how easy it is for greed to set in once the town becomes famous and is making just about as much money from tourism as it hopes to make from the tobacco company if it succeeds.

The film is classic Lear as he lampoons just about everything - men of the cloth, men of medicine - they were all men back then, marriage, big business, right ring groups that see Communism everywhere but really just want to be authoritarians themselves, and news anchors back when they were actually respectable and weren't just talking heads.

The billing of the cast is really odd in retrospect. As expected, Dick Van Dyke is top billed. But second billed is...Pippa Scott? She doesn't even have that big a role in the film! And Bob Newhart, who was really great at playing the slimy little weasel here is bottom billed!

I'd highly recommend it. It is certainly one of Dick Van Dyke's better film roles and you get to see Norman Lear at work just as he was becoming famous.