don rickles - The Screengrab

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History (Part Five)

KELLY’S HEROES (1970)

Like Three Kings (which it no doubt inspired), Kelly’s Heroes drops a heist flick into the middle of a war movie and winds up making some interesting points about free will versus obedience in a military setting where the grunts on the ground sometimes have more in common with the low-level enemy soldiers they’re fighting than they do with their high-ranking, high-living superiors. “You and us, we’re just soldiers, right?” Telly Savalas’ Master Sergeant “Big Joe” says to a German tank commander at one point. “We don’t even know what this war’s all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don’t get anything out of it.” True, the sentiment’s a little sketchy when the conflict in question is “The Good War” and the enemy solider in question is wearing Nazi S.S. stripes...but in the midst of the far less good Vietnam War, director Brian G. Hutton’s celebration of enlightened self-interest reached out to peaceniks and free market capitalists alike, courting both groups with a truly bizarre combination of actors including Savalas, Clint Eastwood, Caroll O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton and Don Rickles. Sure, the movie’s pretty good...but I’m guessing it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the wrap party must have been. (AO)

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Three)

FARGO (1996)

Any number of Coen Brothers movies revolve around bumbling get-rich-quick schemes, many of them involving kidnapping, but few characters in film history have gotten in as far over their heads as car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). Jerry’s not looking to make a big score just for the sake of accumulating wealth; as the movie begins, he’s already in deep financial doodoo, although we never find out the exact nature of his troubles. To his credit, one of his schemes is not so boneheaded: a property investment proposal he brings to his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson. In fact, the plan is so good Wade decides to take on the investment himself rather than lending the necessary money to Jerry – though he does offer a nominal finder’s fee. In Jerry’s mind, this betrayal may make his alternate plan more palatable – arranging for the kidnapping of his wife and bilking Wade out of the ransom money. This plan goes much, much worse, however, and before it’s over Wade and his daughter are dead, Jerry is led away in handcuffs and Steve Buscemi is fed into a wood chipper. All that for a little bit of money. (SVD)

Landis and Rickles

Don Rickles and John Landis first worked together in the late 1960s, on the set of the World War II comedy-drama Kelly's Heroes. Actually, "working together" might be stretching it a little. Rickles, then a sometime movie actor but already a stand-up comedy legend, was one of the movie's stars; Landis, not yet the director of National Lampoon's Animal House, was a teenaged "gofer" — "I don't know if you know this," he tells reporter Bruce Bennett, "but production assistant is a relatively new term" — who was at one point pressed into service to appear briefly onscreen as a nun. Twenty-something years later, Landis cast Rickles as a mob lawyer in his 1992 horror comedy Innocent Blood, in which Rickles got his throat torn out by a vampirized Robert Loggia and loaded into an ambulance by an emergency worker played by a creepily solicitous Dario Argento. It took them a long time to figure out how to top that. The answer: a documentary, Mr. Warmth, which covers Rickles's life and career and features performance footage of the eighty-one-year-old comic in action. "It took a long time for him to agree to let me shoot his act," says Landis, because the old trouper, who apparently isn't planning on going anywhere, was afraid that having his material captured on celluloid would kill his career. In the end, though, he agreed, and when he examined the footage himself, Landis thought that he seemed oddly rapt. "Finally," says Landis, "I said, ‘What is so fascinating? You've done this for years.' He said, ‘I've never seen me from behind!'" — Phil Nugent

Posted Oct 18 2007, 01:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: phil nugent, robert loggia, dario argento, national lampoon's animal house, innocent blood, kelly's heroes, don rickles, mr warmth, john landis