It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963) screens this Wednesday on TCM. The madcap road-race featuring a who’s-who of comedy racing across state lines to dig up stolen cash is a marvel of story-line simplicity and fun. I wish I could have seen at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2013 where it was screened on 70mm with five stars in attendance: Barrie Chase, Marvin Kaplan, Mickey Rooney, and Karen Sharpe Kramer. Jonathan Winters, who was supposed to attend, passed away two weeks before that screening. This “comedy to end all comedies” provided him his film debut – it was a role he almost turned down had his wife not changed his mind. It wasn’t the first time his wife could be thanked for a career choice. He had only been married a few months when he lost his wristwatch and his wife read about a talent contest offering up a wristwatch as first prize. They were strapped for cash, she knew he could win, urged him to participate, and a comic was born. What other tidbits might be said of the sprawling cast of Kramer’s slapstick road-trip?
Spencer Tracy: He was Kramer’s favorite actor, and the director cast Tracy in this and other films despite Tracy being medically uninsurable.
Milton Berle: America’s first major television star is also sometimes credited with being the first person to appear on television, thanks to an experimental TV broadcast from 1929. However, a broadcast play of The Queen’s Messenger dating to September 11th, 1928 usurps that claim.
Sid Caesar: A sketch comic and pioneer of ’50s live television, Caesar liked to blend pathos with his comedy and gave writing stints to Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. Brooks, a close friend, said of Caesar: “He was one of the greatest artists ever born. But over a period of years, television ground him into sausages.”
Buddy Hackett: Known for The Love Bug and his work with both Johnny Carson and The Hollywood Squares, his ribald nightclub performances stood in stark contrast to his cleaned up image and had the power to shock the rubes.
Ethel Merman: The First Lady of Broadway Musicals got one of her first stints as a torch singer headlining for Jimmy Durante, who would become a life-long friend. The same could not be said of her relationship to Ernest Borgnine. Borgnine filed for a divorce citing “extreme mental cruelty”. For her part, in her autobiography she devoted a chapter to her marriage to Borgnine consisting of one blank page.
Mickey Rooney: He’s starred in over 300 films and was one of the last surviving stars of the silent film era before he passed away two years ago. He was only four years old when he got to act in his first movie (Not to Be Trusted, 1926), and he was only 18-years-old when he had an affair with Norma Shearer, who was 38 and had married MGM studio exec Irving Thalberg.
Dick Shawn: A stand-up comic with over 35 years on the circuit, he died on the stage of a heart attack. Supposedly when his Hitler character in Springtime For Hitler ( in The Producers) slapped, rather than grabbed, Goebbels hand it gave birth to “The High Five”.
Phil Silvers: “The King of Chutzpah”, aka: Sgt. Bilko, enjoyed a long string of Broadway successes. He was a compulsive gambler and suffered from chronic depression and poor eyesight. He could lose all his money playing craps one night and complain on another day about having no money, only to absent-mindedly pull out a wad of cash from his pocket which he’d already mentally put aside for gambling.
Terry-Thomas: Known for playing upper class cads, Thomas also liked to say that the hyphen in his name represented the gap between his teeth. A gap so famous in Britain that they even named a gap between two bones in the human wrist commonly seen in x-rays after him.
Given the all-star cast and the many famous cameos throughout (The Three Stooges, Carl Reiner, Zasu Pitts, Buster Keaton, etc.) one could spend all day having fun highlighting some trivia for all involved, but that’s time perhaps better spent enjoying a film that starts with a bang the moment Jimmy Durante sails his car off a cliff, only to set in motion an epic cash-grab the moment his character, Smiler Grogan, kicks the can.
