Somehow, I had never seen a Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor team-up before. I’ve seen a few of Wilder’s classics. Not so many of Pryor’s, but I am sure there were a few in there. So, if I am going to try for a classic comedy team that only made a handful of movies together, why not go for one of their best known and try Stir Crazy? If it’s as good as I’ve heard, I can track down some of the others.
Plus, it was directed by Sidney Pointier, and even though I am not overly familiar with his work as a director, as an actor, he was always the coolest guy in the room for any scene he was in, so I can toss off that anecdote early in the review.
Friends Harry (Pryor) and Skip (Wilder) have some problems. Harry, a struggling actor, just lost his catering job. Likewise Skip, a struggling playwright, just lost his department store job. Skip, who is a bit more of an idealistic dreamer than the more pessimistic Harry, talks his friend into leaving New York for Hollywood. Their old car breaks down in the middle of Arizona, and after the two take a job as bank mascots, they are framed for bank robbery and sent to prison. Harry realizes how bad this is, but Skip still thinks he can have reasonable conversations with, oh, everybody, and he may not be completely wrong. It turns out Skip has an untapped skill for rodeo of all things, and the warden (Barry Corbin) really wants to win at prison rodeo. However, Skip learns the whole thing doesn’t really benefit the prisoners, so idealistic Skip has reasons to say no. Can the warden persuade him otherwise? Can the real thieves be caught? And will I got the whole review without mentioning the movie also features JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson two years before they played a married couple in Poltergeist? The answer to the last question is “no”.
So, to cut to the chase and state the obvious: Pryor and Wilder are a delightful comedic team. Everybody knows that, and I do not disagree. That’s especially impressive given Wilder stated in his memoir that the two were not really friends. They had a good professional relationship and enjoyed working together, but they didn’t spend time together outside of whatever movies they were making. But when the two do have scenes together, they do seem like two men of a similar mindset that know each other and are good friends even if Skip’s antics tend to make Harry’s life more miserable.
That said, it does seem as if Wilder got a lot more screentime than Pryor. I don’t know what the reason for that is, but it may have something to do with a factoid I read before typing this up that Pryor, thanks to his cocaine addiction, was often hours late to the set everyday, and for all I know, they just filmed some scenes without him.
As for the movie itself, it’s a lot of fun. True, the plot and jokes have a familiarity to them. That’s hard to avoid. Two guys getting sent somewhere they don’t belong and don’t want to go is as old a story as it gets, and of course the real thieves will be caught by the time the movie ends. The pacing and jokes also have a very old school style that doesn’t seem to happen as much where the two characters go to different places and perform a scene that could easily pass for a sketch on something like Saturday Night Live. What makes the movie, indeed a thing that is very common for comedies today, is that Wilder and Pryor apparently ad-libbed a number of scenes together. That allowed the two to essentially create their comedic characters close to their own, reacting a way that feels natural and still advances the movie. These were two comedy pros who knew what they were doing to make the laughs come. Let them do what they can, and then you get classics like Stir Crazy.
Grade: A
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