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Post by lune7000 on Jul 19, 2021 9:07:21 GMT
I just finished Laughter in Paradise (1951) in which a practical joker who dies leaves a lot of money in his will to his relatives but only if each completes a specific assigned task that is opposite their own personality. For example, a quiet, respectable, retiring writer (Alistar Sims) must commit a crime that gets him 28 days jail (he is so proper that he gift wraps the brick to throw through a window). A unique or inventive premise goes a long way towards making a comedy a success and this movie spun around the difficulty people had doing something opposite their personality.
What are some other comedies based on a unique or inventive premise? You don't need to explain the set up if you don't have the time- I'll look up the premise online.
Thanks- I really appreciate it.
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Post by Isapop on Jul 19, 2021 9:29:12 GMT
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Post by phantomparticle on Jul 19, 2021 10:01:12 GMT
Who's Minding the Mint?
An employee of the U.S. Mint inadvertently takes home and destroys $50,000. In order to restore the money before an audit, he must find someone to help him break into the building and print the missing cash. What happens next certainly is not your ordinary comedy crime caper.
The movie is an underrated gem.
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Post by Isapop on Jul 19, 2021 10:36:00 GMT
Who's Minding the Mint? An employee of the U.S. Mint inadvertently takes home and destroys $50,000. In order to restore the money before an audit, he must find someone to help him break into the building and print the missing cash. What happens next certainly is not your ordinary comedy crime caper. The movie is an underrated gem. Outstanding in that movie is Victor Buono as the "Sea Captain."
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Post by wmcclain on Jul 19, 2021 11:40:44 GMT
The Ritz (1976) is about a man hiding from a mob hit -- by this brother-in-law -- in a gay bath house.
It probably worked better as a stage play with non-stop gags. Rita Moreno and F. Murray Abraham are a hoot, but Jack Weston tends to repeat the punch lines and mug for the camera.
Directed by Richard Lester, not one of his best.
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Post by lune7000 on Jul 19, 2021 20:35:43 GMT
thanks for the suggestions. I just saw a Gregory Peck movie about a guy that has to hold a million pound note for one month. These are the interesting ideas I am looking for.
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Post by divtal on Jul 19, 2021 22:40:57 GMT
Blame it on the Bellboy (1992), is a fun visual, filmed in Venice. It features a largely British cast, with Australian Bryan Brown, and American Bronson Pinchot. A Mafia hit-man, a married man who's off for a weekend tryst through a dating service, and a meek employee who is scouting out a villa for his obnoxious boss, travel to Venice. The hotel bellboy (Pinchot), confuses their names, and gives each of them the wrong information about their assignments. It gets a bit slapstick, toward the end, but is otherwise delightful.
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Post by Prime etc. on Jul 19, 2021 23:05:12 GMT
THE SPY WITH A COLD NOSE 1966
I expected little from it but Lionel Jeffries is hilarious-I don't say that often about comedies---his performance is so amusing.
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Post by Doghouse6 on Jul 20, 2021 1:06:45 GMT
No other film makers could approach the antic and off-kilter creativity of screenwriter/director Preston Sturges, who could be counted upon to dream up his own peculiar brands of chaos. Some examples:
The Palm Beach Story - Convinced she's holding husband Joel McCrea back from attaining success, Claudette Colbert makes up her mind to divorce him and snag a wealthy husband who will then finance McCrea's invention. In short order, she's met willing multimillionaire Rudy Vallee, but McCrea pursues her to Vallee's Florida estate, where she then passes him off as her brother, under the guise of which he's in turn pursued by Vallee's madcap sister Mary Astor.
The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek - After marrying a departing soldier whom she can't remember thanks to a bump on the head, small-town girl Betty Hutton finds herself pregnant and, aided by erstwhile boyfriend Eddie Bracken and younger sister Barbara Lynn, schemes to avoid scandal before her hot-tempered policeman father William Demarest learns of her predicament.
Unfaithfully Yours - When a mix-up leads brilliant symphony conductor Rex Harrison to suspect wife Linda Darnell has been unfaithful, he daydreams during a concert of various ways to deal with the situation and, settling upon the most severe option, sets out to put his plan into action, with hilariously disastrous - if harmless - results.
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Post by manfromplanetx on Jul 20, 2021 1:41:52 GMT
Modern Times (1936) Directed, Written by, Produced and starring Charles Chaplin... A unique late silent comedy film in which the iconic Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern industrialized world, having burnt himself out on the conveyer belt assembly line. Chaplin's film is a comment on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, a slapstick skewering of industrialized capitalist America. A reference to drugs seen in the prison sequence was somewhat daring for the time. The preservation of humanity in a modern, mechanized world profoundly reflects on issues still relevant in this the twenty-first century... One of the first 25 films selected in 1989 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"
Testing the Mechanical lunch feeder for factory worker efficiency
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Post by bravomailer on Jul 20, 2021 1:50:52 GMT
Dr Strangelove - toe-to-toe nuclear combat with the Russkis.
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