“I’m being irrational. I sit there listening to stories about the Guacamole Act of 1917 and tsetse flies carrying off small children and I’m being irrational?”
“I have flames on my car! I HAVE FLAMES ON MY CAR!”
“You’re dead, right? Good!”
“Are you interested in joining (the CIA)? I tell you, the benefits are fantastic. The trick is not to get killed; that’s really the key to the whole benefits program.”
“Serpentine, Shel, serpentine!”
“You know, I’m such a great driver, it’s incomprehensible that they took my license away.”
If you laughed in recognition at any of the above quotes, you know the joys of The In-Laws, written by Andrew Bergman and directed by Arthur Hiller, one of the great nutty comedies ever made. Farces like this are extremely hard to pull off, which make this all the more joyous that Bergman and Hiller, along with the cast, pull it off.
The in-laws in question are Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) and Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk). Sheldon is a dentist who works in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey with his wife Carol (Nancy Dussault). His daughter Barbara (Penny Peyser) is marrying Tommy Ricardo (Michael Lembeck), Vince’s son. Vince, who claims to be in international consulting, turns Sheldon off the first time they meet – at a dinner of both families, just days before the wedding – by his wild tales about his time in Guatemala (the quote about the Guacamole Act of 1917 refers to that), as well as his wild shifts in mood (Vince goes from crying at Sheldon’s toast to asking to use the phone and then yelling at Tommy when he makes a crack about the mysterious calls Vince always makes). Barbara and Carol are convinced Sheldon is just anxious about the wedding, and urge him to give Vince a chance. Sheldon gets more than he bargained for when he agrees, only to find out Vince is really a CIA agent, and is involved in a scheme to bring stolen U.S. engravings (which he arranged to have stolen) to a Latin American dictator (Richard Libertini) who wants to ruin the world’s economy by printing up millions of dollars of money from the U.S. and other First World countries.
The movie started out with the studio behind the buddy cop movie Freebie and the Bean, which Arkin appeared in opposite James Caan, wanting to make a sequel. As Arkin didn’t particularly care for that movie, he declined, but he did see the comic potential of putting himself on-screen opposite someone who would drive him crazy, and he thought Falk, best known at the time for Columbo and his collaborations with John Cassavetes (Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence), would be perfect for that. Arkin, who also served as executive producer of the movie, zeroed in on Bergman after reading his original treatment for Blazing Saddles (under the title Tex X), and again, Bergman’s screenplay is a large part of why the movie works. The plot comes off like clockwork, which is always key for a farce like this, and even the exposition scenes – in a diner, where Vince has to explain the plot to Sheldon – are made funny because of the dialogue (“Why am I getting excited? The central piece of evidence in the biggest federal crime since the atomic spy case, AND YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I’M GETTING EXCITED?!?”), and because it’s grounded in the conflict between Sheldon’s increasingly harried nature and Vince’s unruffled calm. And Bergman, at his best (Blazing Saddles, The Freshman) brings together incongruous elements to make them funny, like a firing squad singing “Buffalo Gal Can You Come Out Tonight?”, or Vince telling a cab driver (David Paymer in his first role) about the benefits of working at the CIA (the line about “benefits” I referred to above). Bergman would later tell “Entertainment Weekly” that while he hated constructing plots, he loved constructing characters, and Sheldon and Vince are the best he ever created.
Of course, Arkin and Falk deserve a lot of the credit for the movie as well. As I mentioned when writing about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Catch-22, Arkin was mostly known at the time for bringing a manic intensity to his performances (he’s since shown he can be restrained as well), and he’s definitely manic here, but it works perfectly for the part of someone who has unwillingly fallen down the rabbit hole. As for Falk, as Charles Taylor pointed out when reviewing the so-so 2003 remake for Salon (with Albert Brooks in the Arkin role and Michael Douglas in the Falk role), what makes Falk so funny is he plays Vince less as James Bond and more like an accountant discussing actuarial tables.* In addition, while white actors off course need to stop playing non-white roles, Libertini is hysterical playing a caricature of a dictator, who does a Senor Wences impersonation and tells Sheldon and Vince he is a pacifist by nature before adding, “I wish I had a choice but to kill you”). There’s also great work in smaller roles from Ed Begley Jr. as a CIA agent who tells Sheldon Vince is crazy (“I could tell you stories”) and James Hong as a co-pilot of a private plane Vince arranges for, who gives the traditional before-the-flight safety instructions to Sheldon, in Cantonese. It also helps Hiller keeps this all on an even keel. Hiller was never one of my favorite directors (I’m not a fan of his most well-known movie, Love Story), but he did make two other good offbeat comedies – The Hospital, written by Paddy Chayefsky, and The Lonely Guy, based on a book by Bruce Jay Friedman – so he knew how not to get in the way of great material, and The In-Laws is great material.
*-This is one of only a handful of movies made after 1960 my late father liked – he would often show it to house guests – and the only disagreement he and I ever had over the film was who was funnier, Arkin (me) or Falk (him).
