Touche pas à mon gazon

I love this movie! I saw it with my mom in '77 and even though I couldn't have possibly gotten all the jokes and double entendres, I loved it. Seeing it now (I own it on VHS; they don't put movies like this out on DVD all that often), I love it even more.

Everything about it positively SCREAMS mid-1970s, from Dick's Thunderbird with the 600-feet-long hood to Jane's clunky Mercury Montego wagon to JANE FONDA WEARING HER JEANS ROLLED UP TO JUST BELOW THE KNEE TO SHOW OFF HER BOOTS! If you're a 70s afficianado, you can't help but love the time capsule that this movie represents. Another big bonus is the guy who played Schneider on One Day at a Time, who here plays a loud contractor with a big bullhorn.

As others have noted, the movie is also a time capsule to an era when it was not only OK, but funny to slam African Americans, Hispanics and especially gays. It was a little painful to see George Segal be so homophobic, but I choose to see this as a reflection of how far society has leapt in the last 25 years.

I've read elsewhere that Jane only made this movie for the $ to support then-husband Tom Hayden's political campaign/career. Even still, the late 1970s was Jane's era, in which she cranked out gem after gem, from the Electric Horseman to an incredibly bitchy role in The California Suite to a powerful performance in The China Syndrome.

All in all, FWDAJ is a funny time capsule that has a few messages, but don't be mislead by posters here who say it's a thinly-veiled moralistic movie. IT IS NOT! It's a fun romp, nothing more or less.

PS: Remember when they sold those things called record albums, the sleeves of which could conceal a gun during an attempted hold-up?!

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.

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!

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.

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 ****