Blu-ray Review: City Slickers (1991)

Now Available 

Vacations are always better when, as comedy screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel note, "you know who you're taking a trip with" and this is especially true when you're asking an audience of strangers around the world to come along.

Passionate about telling a character-driven story "even in a high-concept comedy" like City Slickers, which was based on an idea Billy Crystal dreamed up while watching a TV show about fantasy vacations, Ganz and Mandel take the time to develop the characters beyond the recognizable men bringing them to life.

Centered on three lifelong friends comprised of Crystal's neurotic Mitch, Daniel Stern's mild-mannered pushover Phil, and Bruno Kirby's obligatory, macho alpha male Ed, Slickers opens during the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain which puts their lives and relationship to the test in what we discover is just the latest in a long line of wild excursions.

Though broadly comic at first glance, the sequence works well on another level beyond simply establishing who the leads are as we begin to foreshadow what conflicts the three might need to resolve over the course of what's been far too often dismissed as a midlife crisis comedy (when in truth taking inventory of one’s life can happen at any age).

"It's never enough for you," an injured Mitch tells Ed after conceding that not only are their "adventures becoming stupid" but, as his patient wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig) notes, perhaps these trips "are a desperate attempt to cling to" their youth.

Keeping his head down for a year until the annual depression of his birthday sets in, after a catastrophic start to his thirty-ninth year leads to problems at work, a breakdown at Career Day after his son tells classmates he's a submarine commander, and a major blow up between Phil and his domineering wife (which magnifies his recent malaise), Barbara practically pushes Mitch out the door.

A present from Phil and Ed, this time the destination takes the three to New Mexico. Hoping to fulfill his childhood dream to be cowboy "Mitchie the Kid," they set off to drive a herd of cattle up to Colorado alongside a father/son duo of dentists from Baltimore, a pair of brothers who run a bestselling ice cream company, and a beautiful woman whose friend bailed at the last minute.

And while this is when the action truly begins, from a narrative perspective it's important to realize that – by the time they've landed – nearly an entire act has gone by where we've formed a solid foundation with the characters, which doesn't often happen today in films that would instead prefer to start in the middle to cater to the shortest of attention spans.

Using Jack Palance's iconic performance in Shane as the inspiration for his Academy award-winning role as Curly the intimidating Trail Boss who, as Mitch says "the toughest man I've ever seen in my life," the New Yorker's mile-a-minute one-liners and stampede causing portable coffee maker initially rubs Curly the wrong way.

Butting heads from the start, once Mitch stands up to him after apologizing for his earlier jokes, Palance's cowboy becomes a surprising source of enigmatic wisdom to Mitch and as such, helps the viewer take Slickers more seriously as a western than spoof.

Comparing the "City Slickers" to Curly, as Ganz and Mandel opine in one of this Shout Select edition's many behind-the-scenes featurettes, one of their biggest challenges as screenwriters was that in reality, "these characters had no business being in his world."

Raising the stakes as well as decreasing the number of talented actors onscreen (including David Paymer and Helen Slater), the writers treated it like an Agatha Christie style murder mystery in order to drop the ensemble down from eleven people to our main three organically. And illustrating just how much has happened along the way, by the time it becomes another one of Mitch, Phil, and Ed's legitimate adventures, we realize that we aren't riding alongside the same three men we first met back in Spain.

In other words, all the time spent inviting us "to move in with the characters" ensured that rather than a mere gimmicky western comedy, midlife crisis movie, or fish-out-of-water story, we're watching a tale about three men who learn that rather than to try to recapture their youth, it's time to grow up into the men they really want to be.

Featuring terrific performances by its impressive cast including the many supporting players who each get the chance to steal at least one scene, in the end it's Palance, Crystal, Kirby, and especially Stern who do a great job of balancing out pathos and drama with the comedy as leads.

Inventively directed by Ron Underwood, who punctuates some of the jokes by reframing them in a western homage that makes them even funnier as in a memorable ode to Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the newly released 4K scanned print on Shout's Blu-ray showcases the film's beauty while also giving Underwood, Crystal, and Stern an audio commentary track.

And although some of the bonus featurettes get repetitive as they reuse interview clips under different headings – making you wonder if they should've just served up one long featurette – overall the quality of the bonus material on this disc is first rate.

Featuring two deleted scenes that would've changed the ending of the movie, with Underwood explaining why they were left on the cutting room floor in tandem with Ganz and Mandel's reflections on how to not only set up a character-driven storyline but also go against viewer expectations by shifting tone and emphasis, we're able to appreciate just how much work went into creating this contemporary classic.

That being said, admittedly it's a film I didn't connect with all that much upon its initial release mostly because as a child, I couldn't relate to much beyond Crystal's one-liners or moments of broad situational humor.

However, now that I'm roughly the same age as the film's characters, it proved to be an ideal time to revisit the work that inspired my favorite Academy Awards ceremony of all time, as Crystal started improvising jokes about his costar's strength and virility after Palance won his award.

Unlike too many generic contemporary comedies sure to be forgotten as soon as the credits roll, City Slickers holds up remarkably well twenty-seven years later, undoubtedly because not only do we know our characters, they're people we still recognize today, whether running from a bull, freaking out on their birthday, or riding the range.

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TV On DVD: Make 'Em Laugh (2009) -- 3-DVD Set

The Popular PBS 6-Episode

Study of America's "Funny Business"
(With Plenty of Funny and Not as Much Business)
Is Now Available

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"Funny is funny. No matter what language. No matter who says it."
-- Rose Marie

Ms. Marie may indeed be right-- much like that memorable scene in Reality Bites when aspiring filmmaker Winona Ryder is asked to define "irony," then struggles and replies, "I know it when I see it," the same is essentially true of comedy.

Hard to pinpoint and even harder for it to be successful as we all learned from witnessing the crash and burn of our favorite comics as they mug too much in the pursuit of a laugh (Mike Meyers in The Love Guru, Steve Martin in The Pink Panther) but we definitely know it when we see it.

A documentary about comedy in the United States-- whether it's silent comedy, slapstick, stand-up, situation comedy, variety show format, reality television, or satire-- is all explored in this terrific six episode documentary from Michael Kantor who managed to put together the equally brilliant six-part piece on Broadway: The American Musical back in 2004.

While he won't be giving Ken Burns a run for his money anytime soon focusing on entertainment and relying mostly on interviews and rare archived footage rather than government documents-- it's a damn sight more entertaining than some of the undeniably brilliant, yet intellectually exhausting Burns documentaries.

As Kantor quotes E.B. White in the introduction to Rhino Entertainment's beautifully boxed three disc set, "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it." While I definitely disagree that few people are interested-- there is fear when one breaks down the funny that the spell will be broken, the illusion never the same, as though we were let behind the curtain at Oz and then told we must return to Kansas and forget everything we saw when we were there.

Yet, Make 'Em Laugh is more a celebration of humor in this country or more precisely, one that's nearly exclusively focused on the twentieth century--save for a brief twenty-first century comedy health check-- so to speak as the interviewees discuss modern marvels like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the films of Judd Apatow before ultimately admitting that in a sense humor as we knew it is evolving, as reality television and YouTube overtake the situation comedy (already growing scarce) and the business goes through another incarnation.

Although all six parts recently aired on PBS during the past month, Rhino loads the discs with bonus content that goes further in-depth with some of the interviewees as many viewers-- including this one-- found themselves even more entranced by the astute observations of the professionals working in the trade than by the "experts" or narration by Amy Sedaris (whose involvement I applaud as-- essentially-- save for a few big standouts, comedy has overwhelmingly been a male dominated industry).

The series is broken up into the following episode titles: 1) "Would Ya Hit A Guy With Glasses? Nerds, Jerks & Oddballs;" 2) "Honey I'm Home! Breadwinners and Homemakers;" 3) "Slip On a Banana Peel-- "The Knockabouts;" 4) "When I'm Bad, I'm Better-- The Groundbreakers;" 5) "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break-- The Wiseguys;" 6) "Sock It To Me?-- Satire and Parody."

Featuring astute observations by comics and historians alike, Make 'Em Laugh is a comedy lover's dream, unearthing some rare and classic footage of old routines by early silent pioneers like Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin before moving into the realm of The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jonathan Winters, Mae West, Jerry Lewis, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, W.C. Fields, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, and many more.

And it isn't long before we begin uncovering patterns throughout the comedic work of the decades investigated and above all the way that past comics have influenced the subsequent generations as seeing early Winters improvisational material and his joke about being from outer space (but not being able to talk about it) seemed to have a startling impact on Robin Williams and George Carlin's love of language (including those famous words you're not aloud to say on television) seems to find its way into the semantic driven jokes of Jerry Seinfeld whose made a career of playing with phrasing and reveling in linguistic gymnastics.

Particularly significant, not just for its inclusion of such legends as Cheech and Chong, Laurel and Hardy, Woody Allen, Andy Kaufman, Steven Martin, The Smothers Brothers, Eddie Murphy, and many, many others-- where Make 'Em Laugh truly succeeds is in championing some forgotten or overlooked performers those of us in my generation may not be familiar with including Moms Mabley, Paul Lynde, Tom Lehrer, and others-- just like other recent PBS specials like the Mitzi Gaynor documentary-- Make 'Em Laugh finds you longing for a comprehensive set or release of some of the work of these comedy masters.

Whether or not they come from outer space, as so many comics joke throughout in describing one another seems unfathomable although their skill cannot be denied even though what one person finds funny differs from person to person (as I felt myself wanting to fast forward through The Three Stooges yet relishing in every detail about The Marx Brothers). And although the special never quite manages to figure out just what it is that makes some people so incredibly funny-- the answer it seems could very well lie in the topic itself as humor in America seems to have an overwhelmingly blue-collar, pull-yourself-up, "respect me, damn it" quality about itself as host Billy Crystal notes that so many comedians suffer from intense anxiety or emotional issues.

And sure enough, a recurring theme is focusing on the revenge of the nerds or those who were picked on as they chide that Woody Allen himself wasn't going to get women but because he's funny, he would succeed and Phyllis Diller began performing at thirty-seven to escape a horrific marriage, dragging five kids along from show to show and indeed the situation comedy or as Jeff Foxworthy jokes-- the idea that everyone's family is crazy-- helps us all make it through the rough times.

It's distinctly American to never give up, to keep fighting and to aspire for perfection even if you're aiming inward for self-deprecation or outward as we're lucky enough to live in a society where people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can keep our leaders in check due to the first amendment. And sure enough, subtly laced underneath all the hilarious remarks and footage, the story of our country is being told, personified by those throughout who used their comedy or turned to the genre to escape ridicule as Chris Rock cleverly reveals that there's something about being picked on as a kid that makes one work harder as he's never satisfied, noticing everything, and wanting to strive for perfection so as never to get picked on again.

As Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In producer George Schlatter argues, "we should treasure our comedians more than we do, because they contribute more to our society than we're aware of,"and inevitably all one needs to do to understand his view is to watch ten or twenty minutes of this roughly six hour set to realize that is precisely the case. And moreover, it's through the wide range of voices whether it's a mischievous redhead named Lucille Ball, wacky stoners like Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, a blue-collar mother like Roseanne, the audacity of Lenny Bruce, a wild and crazy Steve Martin, a curmudgeon like Larry David, a wisecracking Bart Simpson, and countless others that help define our societal landscape just as much as who we vote for president, as evidenced when Richard M. Nixon decided to request a "sock it to me," by appearing on Rowan which he once stated helped win him the presidency. Thus, in the end, comedy-- just like baseball, apple pie, and jazz-- is America.