Innocuous takeoff on the Lady Vanishes and Night Train railroad thrillers, executed with little sense of the style of the Hitchcock-Reed prototypes, and replacing the sophisticated fun with a more sophomoric type. The poppycock plot has a movie buff's sure feel for standard cloak-and-daggar situations (the funniest gimmick is having …
Bud Yorkin's highly inventive, highly inebriated spoof on the preposterous intrigues of Dumas-esque historical fiction, with Gene Wilder, often a scream, and Donald Sutherland each portraying mismatched twins — dimwit peasants on one side and cruel nobles on the other — who are all brought together by Destiny's design on …
Two fugitives from the Broadway rat race run afoul of the law (alternate spelling: afowl) when two Arizona bad men steal their woodpecker costumes and stick up a bank. As the two innocent prison inmates (oh, of course: jailbirds), Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor come across as equally hysterical -- …
Gene Wilder > Johnny Depp. But you knew that.
American translation, and quite faithful in letter, of the Yves Robert comedy, Pardon Mon Affaire. But something has been lost. The attempt to broaden (or simplify or clarify) the humor, and thus the appeal, doesn't just cheapen it; it changes it. This is true even down to the casting level. …
The flaws in director and co-writer Paul King’s prequel are obvious, starting with the fact that he’s taken the anarchic and unsettling confectionary overlord given to us by author Roald Dahl (and famously embodied onscreen by Gene Wilder) and turned him into a human version of his previous star, the …
The flaws in director and co-writer Paul King’s prequel are obvious, starting with the fact that he’s taken the anarchic and unsettling confectionary overlord given to us by author Roald Dahl (and famously embodied onscreen by Gene Wilder) and turned him into a human version of his previous star, the …
A skittish, inconsistent comedy about a starstruck rube from Milwaukee who travels to Hollywood in the 1920s ("Hollywood!" he shrieks from his hotel window. "Lillian Gish is in those hills!"), intent on launching himself on a new career as a Matinee Idol. Gene Wilder, a Chaplin-is-my-idol, quintuple-threat moviemaker (actor, director, …
Mel Brooks’s insular spoof on the old Universal Pictures horror series — it doesn’t reach very far in any direction, but it expends a good deal of comic energy within the narrow confines. Basically, it resembles the sort of affectionate parody of old movies common on the Carol Burnett Show, …