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    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1960s
    Movies - 1960s Movies - I 3 Mins Read

    It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

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    It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was not only one of the longest comedies on film (at nearly three hours in its original version), it also boasted one of the most impressive casts of comic actors ever assembled: Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, Dick Shawn, Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters and far too many others to mention.

    Leading man Spencer Tracy held the monstrous cast together, playing the lone straight man in a line-up of jokers.

    madmadmadworld3

    The screwball antics are touched off by a freak death on a California mountain pass. Recently freed bank robber ‘Smiler’ Grogan (Jimmy Durante, in one of the film’s countless celebrity cameos) careens off a cliff, crashing onto the desert floor below.

    Before he kicks the bucket (literally), Grogan tells a secret to the motorists who have stopped to help: $350,000 in stolen loot is buried beneath ‘the big W’ at a not-too-distant park.

    The motorists’ henpecked hubby J. Russell Finch (Berle), his wife (Dorothy Provine) and mother-in-law (Merman), dentist Melville Crump (Caesar) and his wife (Edie Adams), comedy writers Benjy Benjamin (Hackett) and Ding Bell (Rooney), dim-witted moving man Lennie Pike (Winters) and two enterprising cabbies (Peter Falk and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) all try to decide on a fair way of splitting the cash, but negotiations crumble once greed sets in.

    The “every man for himself” race for the big W attracts the attention of the police, and unfailingly honest Captain T.G. Culpepper is soon on the treasure hunters’ trail.

    madmadmadworld4

    By the time the money madness hits its peak, the hunt has been joined by con man Otto Meyer, drunken millionaire Tyler Fitzgerald and others, as one slapstick sequence follows another until the madcap finale.

    Shot in the widescreen Cinerama format, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World still barely had room to fit its enormous cast of characters. In addition to the major roles, the movie had surprising cameos at every turn: Jerry Lewis, Don Knotts, Carl Reiner, ZaSu Pitts, Doodles Weaver, the Three Stooges, and once more, too many others to mention.

    An army of stuntmen was called into service as well, as the film tried to match the size of its cast with the size of its slapstick stunts.

    The movie’s length was cut to just over two hours for subsequent showings on television and on video, but its full three-hour glory was eventually restored, allowing audiences to recapture the madness as it was meant to be seen.

    Capt. C.G. Culpepper
    Spencer Tracy
    J. Russell Finch

    Milton Berle
    Melville Crump

    Sid Caesar
    Benjy Benjamin

    Buddy Hackett
    Mrs Marcus

    Ethel Merman
    Ding Bell

    Mickey Rooney
    Sylvester Marcus

    Dick Shawn
    Otto Meyer

    Phil Silvers
    J. Algernon Hawthorne

    Terry-Thomas
    Lennie Pike

    Jonathan Winters
    Monica Crump

    Edie Adams
    Emmeline Finch

    Dorothy Provine
    Smiler Grogan

    Jimmy Durante
    Jimmy the Crook

    Buster Keaton
    Tyler Fitzgerald

    Jim Backus
    Sheriff Mason

    Andy Devine
    Chief Aloysius

    William Demarest 
    Col. Wilberforce

    Paul Ford

    Director
    Stanley Kramer

    Video

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