Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad

In fact, I saw first the play in the 70's, in my city, Barcelona, in a very good performance, and the public was very delightful. As a curiosity: the role of the Mother was played... by a man! That gave a satirical and extravagant turn to the show. Unfortunately, the film of Quine is, sadly, a disaster: a comedy without grace, very boring and it is a pity that such a talented director fall so low in this movie: it is very difficult to complete the vision of this film. The impression of the play was that it is a experimental comedy. But the impression of the film is that it is a very nonsense history with characters very ridiculous.

Eccentric, maniacal widow and her child-like grown son travel with her husband--dead for years in his coffin, and stuffed!--to a Jamaican resort; she has also brought along hungry piranha, the son's stamp collection, rare coins and ("not smart") Venus Flytraps. Director Richard Quine and producer Ray Stark were probably hoping for another outrageous, morbid comedy along the lines of "The Loved One", but this dire adaptation of Arthur L. Kopit's darkly-comic play is so far-out that it isn't funny--it's mostly off-putting. Paramount Pictures shelved the final results for nearly two years before finally releasing it with a Jonathan Winters prologue (he also speaks for the deceased husband, chiming in often with snarky, mordant comments). The picture is full of top talents, not the least of which is Rosalind Russell as the bewigged Madame Rosepettle (who approaches her role as if Auntie Mame had become a drill sergeant). There was probably no way to make Kopit's material work on film without rethinking it completely. When Barbara Harris can't even get a laugh, you know something's off. Biggest asset: Neal Hefti's bouncy score. *1/2 from ****

Okay, so the sixties was the decade when lots of rules were broken and new frontiers were forged. Unfortunately, alot of this rule-breaking looks self-indulgent and stupid now. Take the case of OH DAD ..., which is based on a George(or is it William?)Kopit play. Not quite absurdist but definitely absurd, the story involves a woman who lugs her dead husband's corpse with her and her adult virgin son as they traverse various resorts. Rosalind Russell is the white-clad, pastel-wigged mother, Robert Morse the wimpy man-child, and Jonathan Winters is Poor Dad in the closet(also the narrator). Also on hand is Barbara Harris as a young nymphet--one of the few reasons to see the movie. I happen to like Harris, and her film roles are few and far between(FREAKY FRIDAY and FAMILY PLOT are probably her most readily available films), so I grabbed POOR DAD at a small independent video shop several years ago. Harris is a great comic actress, and although she is one of the good things about POOR DAD, it's not one of her better efforts.

Winter's character narrates and points out the plot points of this film as it goes along, almost to cue the audience how to react to the next scene. It's interesting to note that, despite all the big names, this movie tanked. Probably because nobody knew what the hell this movie was--Winters' wacky narration and the goofy flashbacks detailing his courtship and marriage of Russell (who parodies her Auntie Mame persona) stab at being comic in that manic 1960s way (think of the way the old Monkees TV show was shot), or some kind of weird symbolic representation of the spiritual bankruptcy of the collective American soul (nobody has a corpse in a closet strickly for shtick purposes). And THAT TITLE . . . a sure sign the film is a bomb. If you're a student of film and feel the need to survey the various kinds of films that were perpetrated during the sixties, you might want to give this one a try. Or maybe not

I've seen the film AND read the play, which I think makes me unique. It also makes me queasy. The word `queasy' is not a staple of my vocabulary, for some reason, but it leapt readily to mind as a precise description of how this miserable, grotty-looking, dull, funny-as-chloroform movie made me feel, and will make you feel, too, if you're not careful. The play was little more than a foray into a now extinct breed of artiness. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it has never been produced anywhere in the world since 1970 - and hopefully, the sun will grow cold before it is produced anywhere ever again. The film is a botched version of the play, AND a foray into extinct artiness in its own right. Moreover I think something was wrong with the film stock. The very colours upset my stomach.

Here is what remains of the plot synopsis, excluding that which has been so wittily summed up by the title: a widow has had her dead husband stuffed; she lugs his preserved corpse around wherever she travels; she has an idiot son who is sort of undergoing a sexual awakening (DON'T expect anything salacious); and that's about it. Every so often the dead father will appear in a little bubble in the top right-hand corner of the screen and comment on what, if anything, is going on. Sometimes he'll talk to his son. Sometimes he'll address the audience, with lines like, `Not much will happen in the next few minutes.' If he'd been honest, he would have added, `And not much will happen after that, either, so if you're thinking of walking out, cut your losses and do so NOW.'

Don't get me wrong - the 1960s was the tail end of Hollywood's golden age, producing delightful throw-backs like **** and stunning new masterpieces like ****. (I'm sorry - I simply couldn't bear to see the names of two of my favourite films associated in any way with this one.) But it was also the Decade of Floundering. If you want to see just how badly Hollywood was floundering in the 'sixties, by all means watch this movie - but you'll probably decide that you didn't really want to know, after all.

Prior to my seeing Oh Dad, Poor Dad I confessed to an admiration for Rosalind Russell in that she had not gone the horror and gore route that so many of her female contemporaries had. Then I saw this.

With her ever changing hair color like the horse in the Wizard Of Oz and grand presence borrowed somewhat from Mama Rose in Gypsy, Russell plays a domineering mother who has sheltered her son Robert Morse to the point of him being socially backward. They're rich as Midas and can indulge in a lot of activities that people would say they were candidates for HappyDale if they didn't have that kind of wealth. One of them is carrying around a coffin with the body of her late husband and Morse's father. I'm sure it's the best work some taxidermist ever did. She must have read what Oxford did with Jeremy Bentham.

Anyway a couple of predatory fortune hunters are after them at the latest tropical paradise they've lighted. Sea Captain Hugh Griffith is chasing Russell and bimbo Barbara Harris is after Morse. Therein lies the story.

I learned two things about this film. After it was completed Paramount held it up for two years and cast Jonathan Winters as her late husband who takes his first flight on his new wings to observe the family he left behind. Little squib insertions were put into the film with Winters offering Greek chorus commentary at intervals. That in itself tells you the film needed help.

Secondly in Russell's own autobiography she wasn't crazy about the end product feeling that she and the director were working at cross purposes. Personally I didn't think the film had much purpose to begin with.

Roz took the place Hermione Gingold who did this on stage and the imbecile son was played by a young Sam Waterston. All I can say is Jack McCoy came from one bad beginning.

Roz Russell's own fans will be terribly disappointed.