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A FINE MESS
d. Blake Edwards, 1986
26 July 2009
I know what you're thinking. Any movie that opens with an elderly Larry Storch as a Nazi doctor concocting a giant horse suppository in a lab full of dry ice and beakers full of food coloring is going to be great. Right?
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A FINE MESS was marketed in part as Blake Edwards' tribute to Laurel & Hardy. I was prepared to dislike the film intensely on that basis. Given the era in which it was made, the state of Edwards' work at the time, and the cast, it was clear to me that the film had no hope of being anything other than a grave insult to the memories of Stan and Ollie.
The first sight of Richard Mulligan's horrendous Stan Laurel impersonation confirmed and deepened my expectations. I gritted my teeth and prepared to groan and ache my way through what I was certain would be an agonizingly bad movie. And not without a certain glee, I must admit. If the handling of the material was as callous and inept as I was sure it would be, A FINE MESS stood every chance of being a film so appallingly terrible that I'd end up buying a copy to foist on my disbelieving friends. Look at this! Look how awful! What were they thinking???
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In retrospect, I should have had more faith in Blake Edwards' fractured sensibilities in the 1980s. In the way that THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN awkwardly shifts in tone from romantic comedy to shallow psychological study to slapstick farce, A FINE MESS loses track of its initial comic conceit rather early. Mulligan pops up here and there doing his strange Stan Laurel bit, but his mugging and posturing are so insipid that you soon forget who he's trying to mimic, and end up just feeling sorry for the poor guy having to do it through an entire movie.
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Setups which should naturally lead to Laurel & Hardy-like gags are ignored. Gags which bear no relation to Laurel & Hardy's humor abound.
There is a sequence in the film in which a piano is introduced, singled out for attention, and scheduled to be delivered to a leading character's tiny apartment. When the movers arrive with the piano, nothing happens. Nothing. Yes. In a film which purports to be a tribute to Laurel & Hardy, a piano is moved without incident.
The shot to the right is not only not funny, it breaks what little rhythm the scene it interrupts had. Badly timed, ill-executed moments like this comprise more than their share of the film.
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You see these two and you just know that there will be antics.
And these antics... these antics will be hilarious.
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Why does Ted Danson exist?
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Oh, yes. Ted Danson's character is an irresistable ladies' man.
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