| It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster by Jack Davis |
|
| Directed by | Stanley Kramer |
| Produced by | Stanley Kramer |
| Written by | William Rose Tania Rose |
| Starring | Spencer Tracy Milton Berle Sid Caesar Jonathan Winters Mickey Rooney Buddy Hackett Buster Keaton Jimmy Durante Terry-Thomas Phil Silvers Dick Shawn Edie Adams Paul Ford Ethel Merman Dorothy Provine Peter Falk |
| Music by | Ernest Gold |
| Cinematography | Ernest Laszlo |
| Editing by | Gene Fowler Jr. Robert C. Jones Frederic Knudtson |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | November 7, 1963 |
| Running time | 161 minutes 210 minutes (Original cut) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $9.4 million |
| Box office | $46,332,858 |
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a 1963 American comedy film produced and directed by Stanley Kramer[1] about the madcap pursuit of $350,000 in stolen cash by a diverse and colorful group of strangers. The ensemble comedy premiered on November 7, 1963.
Contents |
"Smiler" Grogan (Jimmy Durante), suspect in a tuna factory robbery 15 years before and on the run from the police, recklessly passes a number of vehicles on a twisting, mountainous road in the Mojave Desert of Southern California before careening his car off a cliff and crashing. Five motorists from four of the passed vehicles stop to assist: Melville Crump (Sid Caesar), a dentist; Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters), a furniture mover; Dingy Bell (Mickey Rooney) and Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett), two friends on their way to Las Vegas; and J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle), an entrepreneur. Just before he kicks the bucket (his foot literally hits a bucket as he dies), Grogan tells the Samaritans about $350,000 buried in Santa Rosita State Park near the Mexican border, under a "Big W". Initially, the motorists try to reason with one another on how to share the money, but when they can't agree on any one particular distribution, it soon becomes an all-out race to get to the loot first.
Meanwhile, Captain T. G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy) of the Santa Rosita Police Department has been patiently working on the Grogan case for 15 years, hoping to someday solve it and retire with honor. Learning of the fatal crash, he suspects that "Smiler" might have given one or more of the witnesses a clue to the stolen loot's location and has police units track their movements.
Everyone experiences multiple setbacks en route to the money. Crump and his wife Monica (Edie Adams) charter a shabby World War I-era biplane to Santa Rosita but get stuck in the basement of a hardware store there. They wreck the place in various failed escape attempts before blasting a hole in the wall with dynamite.
Dingy and Benjy convince pilot Tyler Fitzgerald (Jim Backus) to shuttle them to Santa Rosita in his modern twin-engine aircraft. Fitzgerald carelessly lets them operate the controls while he makes drinks in the back of the plane and is soon knocked unconscious by the pair's erratic steering. The two then have to fly and land the plane on their own.
On the ground, two cab drivers, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and Peter Falk, who respectively whisk Dingy and Benjy away from the airport, and Crump and Monica from the hardware store, also get in on the hunt.
Pike's furniture truck crashes into the car containing Finch, his wife Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and his overbearing dictatorial mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman). The three persuade Pike to ride off for help on a bicycle, then flag down British army Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas), to get them to Santa Rosita and ignore Pike on the roadside nearby. After many arguments, most caused by Mrs. Marcus, she and Emmeline refuse to go any farther, and Finch and Hawthorne leave them behind.
Pike tries to get motorist Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers) to take him to Santa Rosita but foolishly tells him about the scheme, prompting the greedy Meyer to race for the money himself. Pike, outraged, destroys a service station at which Meyer has been forced to stop due to a tire blowout. After the rampage, Pike steals the station's tow truck and later picks up Mrs. Marcus and Emmeline. Mrs. Marcus calls her beach bum son Sylvester (Dick Shawn), who lives near Santa Rosita, to look for the loot, but the Oedipally-obsessed Sylvester races hysterically to the defense of his mother instead. Meyer experiences his own setbacks, including losing his car in a river. All the while, the police secretly track their activities while Culpepper bides his time.
Eventually, all of the interlopers arrive at the state park and begin searching for the "Big W", overseen by Captain Culpepper, disgruntled at being promised a too-small pension and secretly intent on keeping all of the loot for himself. He orders all policemen to leave the area and waits for the others to retrieve the money. Emmeline, the only one who wanted no part of the scheme, is the first to recognize the "Big W" - four large palm trees standing at odd angles. As the watching Culpepper steps out of the bushes and greets her, she unwittingly reveals the location to him and suggests they split the money. Soon Pike and the others notice the palm trees as well and frantically begin digging beneath them, while Culpepper quietly mixes in with the non-diggers. After a suitcase containing the loot is dug up and opened, the group argues about the money's distribution. Culpepper then identifies himself, takes the suitcase, and suggests to the stunned ensemble that they turn themselves in, stating that a jury might be more lenient if they do. Initially taking Culpepper's advice, the defeated claimants climb into the two taxis and drive out of the park.
But when the two taxicab groups notice Culpepper heading away from Santa Rosita with the money, they immediately reverse direction and follow him, foiling his plan to hop a boat bound for Mexico. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to reach Culpepper by radio, the police department realizes what he is doing and revokes his newly-trebled pension — secured for him by Police Chief Aloysius' (William Demarest) arm twisting — and orders Culpepper's arrest.
At the end of the chase, all eleven men in the group are stranded high up on an abandoned building. While trying to keep from falling off the building's disintegrating fire escape ladders, the men lose control of the suitcase containing the money, and all $350,000 flutters down to the astonished crowd watching below, who quickly gather it up. The men then simultaneously attempt to climb down an extended fire truck ladder, but their combined weight makes the firemen lose control of the ladder, which gyrates wildly, flinging them off in various directions.
The dejected men, now immobile in a prison hospital in bandages and casts, blame one another for their predicament as well as criticizing Culpepper for seizing the money. Replying that their sentences likely will be lighter because he will probably take most of the blame in court, ex-Captain Culpepper adds that perhaps in ten or twenty years, there will be something about all this he can laugh about. A sympathetic Benjy throws a banana peel on the floor moments before the nagging Mrs. Marcus (flanked by Monica and Emmeline) enters, scolding all of the hospitalized men for everything. When Mrs. Marcus promptly slips on the banana peel and is carried off on a gurney, all the injured men, including Culpepper, begin to laugh hysterically.
See [3][4] for names and pictures of many of the cast members. The film's opening credits list forty-eight names clearly: all of the 'main' and 'secondary' names above and twenty-nine of the 'cameo appearances', each group approximately or exactly in alphabetical order, though not grouped according to the 'main', 'secondary', 'cameo appearances' groups above. An 'explosion' displays other names not in any of the three lists, including Ade Woolely, Irene Wyman, Bernard Halderson, Bernards Kids, Mary Mathews, Carl Pederson, Oscar Hansson's, Federal Internal Revenue, Francis A. Smith, Bernie Gruver, Carl Person, Danny Smith, Kennedy's, Torty Maumau, Mad Mad Dog Gees, Los Angeles, Elenor Faith, Mary Cane, Ed Levit Artist, Colonal Rhe, Understable, Yorty, McKinley, Tab Collar, Art Goodman, Hugh Childs, Bob Carlson, Bill Melendez (see below), and a smattering of letters and otherwise unassociated names, all of which drop out to show five (Stang, Stewart, Stooges, Tong, White) of the twenty-nine. Right after the 'explosion', the last 'secondary' cast member mentioned is Durante.
Film and television comedian Ernie Kovacs was originally scheduled to play the character "Melville Crump" before his untimely death in an automobile accident on January 13, 1962. Kramer subsequently filled the role with comedian Sid Caesar. Kovacs' wife, Edie Adams, remained on board as Caesar's screen wife, in part due to the enormous tax obligations that Ernie left behind.
Of the film's many actors and actresses, as of December 2011, only Caesar, Chase, Clarke, Freberg, Georgiade, Glenn, Kaplan, Lewis, Bob Mazurki (youngest), Reiner, Rooney (oldest), and Winters were believed to be still alive, evident from the cast members' biographies and other available information.[5] Kennedy (1885) and Horton (1886) were born the earliest, while (excluding Bob Mazurki (1952)) Rhue (1935) and Provine (1935) were born the latest. Harvey died the youngest (51) and earliest (1963), and, to date, Falk died the latest (2011), Lane died the oldest (102). Tracy died more than eight years before Ford, the second of the main or secondary cast members to die. Wally Brown was going to be given a role but died not long before filming began.
Judy Garland, Groucho Marx, Stan Laurel, George Burns, Bob Hope, Jackie Mason, Don Rickles, Judy Holliday, and Red Skelton were among the many celebrities offered or considered for roles in the film. Ethel Merman's role was originally written for Groucho (as Finch's father-in-law), who reportedly demanded too much money; so the part was rewritten. Laurel did not want to be seen in his old age, especially without Oliver Hardy, who died in 1957.
In the early 1960s, screenwriter William Rose, then living in the UK, conceived the idea for a film (provisionally titled Something a Little Less Serious) about a comedic chase through Scotland. He sent an outline to Kramer, who agreed to produce and direct the film. (The setting was subsequently shifted to America and the working title changed to One Damn Thing After Another and then It's a Mad World, with Rose and Kramer adding additional Mads to the title as time progressed.)[6]
Although well known for serious films such as Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg (both starring Tracy), Kramer set out to make the ultimate comedy film. Filmed in Ultra Panavision 70 and presented in Cinerama (becoming one of the first single-camera Cinerama features produced), Mad World also had an all-star cast, with dozens of major comedy stars from all eras of cinema appearing in the film.
The film followed a Hollywood trend in the 1960s of producing "epic" films as a way of wooing audiences away from television and back to movie theaters. Box-office revenues were dropping, so the major studios experimented with a number of gimmicks to attract audiences, including widescreen films.
The title was taken from Thomas Middleton's 1605 comedy A Mad World, My Masters. Kramer considered adding a fifth "mad" to the title before deciding that it would be redundant, but noted in interviews that he later regretted it.
The film's theme music was written by Ernest Gold with lyrics by Mack David. In the 1970s, ABC broadcast the film on New Year's Eve. The last reported showing of the film on major network television was on CBS on May 16, 1978.[7]
The four minute opening animated title sequence was created by Saul Bass.
The opening live action scenes, where "Smiler" Grogan drives off the road, and subsequent scenes when the four vehicles briefly speed down the mountain before slowing down and stopping so that the drivers can talk, were filmed on the “Seven Steps” section (also known as "Seven-Level Hill") of the Palms-to-Pines Highway (California State Highway 74), a generally east-west route mostly south of, and west of, the city of Palm Desert, California. The rocky point where Durante's car sails off into space, known by Mad World fans as "Smiler's Point," can easily be spotted today on Highway 74, minus the man-made, temporary ramp that helped the car go airborne.
Many of the scenes that take place on what look like lonely stretches of road were filmed in areas of Southern California that have since been developed in the decades following the movie's production. Culpepper predicts that the vehicles — generally going east — will head south (a right turn). Not so long after, in a desert highway scene, the four speeding vehicles travel (presumably) somewhat westbound down a slight incline to a "T" intersection and begin to make sweeping left turns (southbound) onto the cross street. The moving van driven by Winters cuts diagonally across a sandy patch of desert adjacent to an intersection. This stunt was performed at the southeast corner of Ramon Road and Bob Hope Drive (Rio del Sol Road at the time) in Palm Desert. The sandy, barren terrain that the moving van cuts across is now the paved and landscaped parking lot of the Agua Caliente Indian Resort & Casino.
During the scene immediately before the start of the mad dash for the $350,000 loot, Crump incorrectly calculates Bell's and Benjamin's share of the cash under his '25 total share plan' as $97,000 rather than $98,000 (7 shares x $14,000/share). Thus, when Crump's stated figures are added the sum is only $349,000.
In the scene where Jack Benny encounters Berle's character and his group, the entire area, which was practically open desert in the film, is now a modern suburban neighborhood in Yucca Valley. Likewise, the scene in which Caesar is momentarily blinded by an unfurled road map, which results in all four vehicles zig-zagging behind one another on a desolate desert road, was filmed as the cars traveled northbound on Rio del Sol Road in Palm Desert. This stretch of roadway is now populated with numerous residences, condominium complexes, and retail businesses and has been widened into a four-lane boulevard.
Many of the actors performed some of their own stunts, including some crashing falls by Caesar, physical antics by Winters, and Silvers' drive into a flowing Kern River, where he almost drowned. Caesar severely injured his back while filming the hardware store scene and was unable to return to the film for some time. Winters had been left tied to a chair while the rest of the cast went to lunch, and when the cast returned an hour later, Winters said, "When I get out of this chair, gang, you [meaning Kaplan and Stang] belong to me" and gave the two a lecture on forced potty training. Silvers injured himself shortly before the shooting of the scene in which the men chase Tracy up several flights of stairs and onto a fire-escape, so Silvers' stunt double stood in for him.
The gas station scenes with Marvin Kaplan and Arnold Stang, first with Berle, Merman, Provine, and Terry-Thomas, and later with Silvers and Winters, were filmed at a specially constructed set built on composer Jimmy Van Heusen's property near Palm Springs, California. Van Heusen first saw the completed gas station on his Friday drive from Los Angeles out to his weekend retreat. He did not know the gas station was a film set, thinking instead that his business manager had leased a portion of his property for an actual service station. The destruction scene with Winters, Kaplan, and Stang was filmed that weekend, with the site cleanup scheduled for the next week (Stang filmed the entire scene nursing a broken wrist in a cast covered by a thick work glove). On Monday morning's return trip to Los Angeles, Van Heusen saw the destroyed gas station and thought something terrible had happened, fearing he might be sued by injured parties.
During shooting of the gas station's destruction, Winters, whose character was the one who toppled the water tower with a tow truck, asked to be the one who backed the truck into the tower. Though two of the tower's legs were rigged with hidden cables which were pulled from offscreen to make the tower fall away from the truck, Kramer overruled Winters, saying that he could not be certain in which direction the tower would fall and thus could not guarantee the actor's safety.
The airport terminal scenes were filmed at the now-defunct Rancho Conejo Airport in Newbury Park, California, though the control tower shown was constructed only for filming. Other airplane sequences were filmed at the Sonoma County Airport north of Santa Rosa, California; at the Palm Springs International Airport; and in the skies above Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, and Orange County.
In the Orange County scene, stuntman Frank Tallman flew a Beech model C-18S through a highway billboard advertising Coca-Cola. A communications mix-up resulted in the use of linen graphic sheets on the sign rather than paper, as planned. Linen, much tougher than paper, damaged the plane on impact. Tallman managed to fly it back to the airstrip, discovering that the leading edges of the wings had been smashed all the way back to the wing spars. Tallman considered that incident the closest he ever came to dying on film. (Both Tallman and his business partner and fellow flier on Mad World, Paul Mantz, would eventually die in separate air crashes over a decade apart.)
In another scene, Tallman flew the plane through an airplane hangar at about 150 knots, with only 23 feet of clearance from wingtips to walls and only 15 feet from the top of the tail to the hangar ceiling. Known as the Butler Building, the hangar was built during World War II and is still in use today at the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, next to the Pacific Coast Air Museum, in Santa Rosa, California.
In the film, the airplane is shown crashing through an airport restaurant's plate glass window and stopping abruptly. Shot in an open hangar made to look like a restaurant, no special effects were used in this scene, which was filmed with the actors and plane (with real propellers destroying the window framework) in the same space at the same time. Careful viewing of this incredibly dangerous shot reveals an arresting cable that was tied to the tail of the airplane at just the right length to make the aircraft stop as it hit a curbing.
Part of the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital retirement community, in Woodland Hills, is visible in the background of the scene where characters Lenny Pike and Mrs. Marcus (in the tow truck Pike stole from the service station he destroyed in his rampage) stop at an intersection (of present-day Mulholland Drive, Valley Circle Boulevard, Avenue San Luis, and Calabasas Road) before making a U-turn. Kramer died in the hospital of the retirement community in 2001. Anderson (1977), Durfee (1975), and Rhue (2003) also died there.
Although the fictional city of Santa Rosita was really shot in Long Beach, California; Rancho Palos Verdes, California; San Pedro, California; and Santa Monica, California; Santa Rosita's location on a map in the police station scenes was (supposedly) south of San Diego, California, and north along the coast from Mexico, hence Culpepper's attempt to flee there. In reality, San Diego's southern city limits border Mexico, and the southernmost "X" on the police station map would also be in San Diego, somewhere between the eastern part of Imperial Beach, California and the southern part of Chula Vista, California.
The YMCA at Long Beach Boulevard at 6th Street in Long Beach stood in for the police station. In one shot near the YMCA, a sign for Cormier Chevrolet, southwest of the station, and Sears store signs, north of the station, appear. However, a Sears store sign also appears above and several businesses away from the hardware store from which Crump and Monica exit, via a Chinese laundry. Combined with other information available from the film, the likely conclusions are that the police station is less than three blocks total from the hardware store and that the Sears store was split between nearby locations. The downtown Long Beach YMCA is now at North Waite Court at 6th Street, a block west of the station location. Neither Cormier Chevrolet nor Sears currently exist in the area (Cormier Chevrolet relocated to its current site, several miles northwest of downtown Long Beach on the San Diego Freeway, in 1965).
"Santa Rosita State Park" was actually a private estate locally known as "Portuguese Point" near Abalone Cove Shoreline Park, Rancho Palos Verdes. None of the "Big W" remains, the last palm having fallen in the 1990s-2000's, although in 2011 internet film maker James Rolfe[9] and homeschooler Price Morgan[10] separately found an angled palm tree stump on the location, which they believed may be the remains of the "Big W". This film location is off-limits to the general public, though the stump can easily be viewed by climbing a hill that is around 100 feet to the east of the house. This hill is gated to vehicles but the public is allowed. Through the years, the property has taken on a noticeable slant toward the ocean, due to the slow but ongoing Portuguese Bend landslide.
The final chase scene actually started in Santa Monica, most notably on Pacific Coast Highway, at the California Incline. At the intersection, the cabs turned left, briefly heading east, then parked, while the police car turned right, heading west, on Pacific Coast Highway. The cabs chased the police car west to Malibu, past Corral Canyon Road and Solstice Canyon Road, nearly as far as Point Dume, to Puerco Canyon Road, down to and east along Malibu Road (although the shots supposedly along Malibu Road were actually filmed at the southern end of South Victoria Avenue in Oxnard, California). In reality, Puerco Canyon Road is east, not west, of Corral Canyon Road and Solstice Canyon Road and of Point Dume. The little that's left of the southern branch of Puerco Canyon Road still intersects with Malibu Road, but the part just to the west of Cher's residence that connected to Pacific Coast Highway is no longer accessible. The ensemble then traversed the path in the opposite direction and continued south to Long Beach, California, where the cars passed The Pike amusement park with its wooden roller coaster, and traveled around the Rainbow Pier. The Arcade under Ocean Boulevard near Pine Avenue is also part of the scene. Near the end of the chase scene, in Long Beach, the vehicles turn by the no-longer-existing Farmers & Merchants Bank branch at or near Long Beach Boulevard and Anaheim Street and, not long after, head east on East 10th Street, turn south onto Long Beach Boulevard (against one-way traffic heading north, with the first cab running over a fire hydrant just outside Daigh's Garage, immediately south of Square Deal Radiator Service, all on the east side of the street), then turn west onto the 200 block of East 9th Street (identified by a street name sign, initially visible to the viewer's left). The abandoned building was on East Broadway in downtown Long Beach. (The sharp-eyed will also note that twice during this chase sequence, the cars drive by buildings adorned with signs reading "Nixon For Governor;" these scenes were shot in 1962, when the future President's ill-fated campaign was in full swing.) The matte painting for the long shot of the plaza required 21 exposures for the composite, seven elements times three color separations.
The fire escape and ladder miniature used in the final chase sequence is on display at the Hollywood Museum in Hollywood. Also, the Santa Rosita Fire Department's ladder truck was a 1960's Seagrave Fire Apparatus open-cab Mid-Mount Aerial Ladder.[11] Portions of the life-size building and fire escape were constructed on the Universal Studios back lot.
Many modern photos exist of the areas used for the filming.[12]
Silvers, a compulsive gambler, had a running crap game going during the production. According to Something a Little Less Serious: A Tribute to 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World', a 1991 documentary included on the DVD version, Jerry Lewis, who has a cameo appearance in the film, reportedly stopped by the set and left $500 poorer.
Veteran stuntman Carey Loftin was also featured in the documentary, explaining some of the complexity as well as simplicity of stunts, such as the day he "kicked the bucket" as a stand-in for Durante.[13]
Kaplan, Provine, and Falk all appeared in the similarly themed Blake Edwards comedy The Great Race two years later.
The film ran 210 minutes in its preview showing. Kramer cut the film to 192 minutes for the premiere release. During its roadshow 70mm run, United Artists, seeing that it had a mammoth hit on its hands, cut the film to 161 minutes without Kramer's involvement in order to add an extra daily showing. The general release 35mm version runs 154 minutes, with overture and exit music excised. At the film's premiere, radio transmissions between the film's fictional police played in the theater lobby and rest rooms during the intermission. The police transmissions featured Detective Matthews (Charles McGraw) and the police personnel that follow the group. These three reports (each approx. one minute in length) may have added to the 210-minute length.
Some of the cut footage remains missing; 20 minutes of material was not found. MGM/UA also located a 20-minute 70 mm preview reel that contained a few scenes in their entirety. These two 70mm reels provided the extra scenes for the "Special Edition version with restored footage" project of 1991. No out-take footage was used, with the exception of a two-second wide shot of the Beechcraft aircraft, needed to bridge a highly sought-after bit of Buddy Hackett being doused with a bucket of water.
While not officially referring to it as a director's cut, Kramer helped oversee the re-incorporation of this missing footage into a 182-minute "special edition" video version for VHS and Laserdisc. Screenwriter Tania Rose was also contacted by the Special Edition team and after viewing the footage gave her endorsement to the project. Because of the quality of the missing scenes, the lack of a large budget for a film restoration, and a lack of interest at the time by restoration experts, it was decided that a digital tape reconstruction for presentation on Laserdisc would at least be a venue for film fans to finally see the footage. Years later, the improved quality of DVD would make the poor quality of the restored footage more jarring, so the standard edited version is presented instead. The special edition version has aired on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Comparisons between the two show that the extended version is of inferior video quality to that of the DVD, since film transfer techniques and formats have improved.
Currently, the best existing footage is in the form of original 70 mm elements of the general release version (recent restored versions shown in revival screenings are derived from these elements). However, some if not all of the remaining footage does exist in some form, although it has deteriorated over time. A restoration effort currently is under way by preservationist Robert A. Harris in an attempt to bring the film back as close as possible to the original roadshow release.
The official release from MGM is the 161-minute general release version, taken from its original 35 mm elements. Because of this, it is presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, as opposed to the full 2.75:1 in anamorphic 70 mm form. Two versions of the film have been released on DVD. The first, from 2001, is a double-sided disc containing an hour of missing scenes on the second side, along with the original documentary "Something a Little Less Serious", and trailers and TV spots. In 2003, the film was released on DVD as a movie-only edition, with disc art on the disc as opposed to being dual-sided. It should be noted that the 2001 release had a blue spine and is now hard to find, while the 2003 release had a yellow spine and is relatively easy to find in stores. Interestingly, the colors in the cartoon credits sequence are incorrect (too red) in the current DVD version. The older Special Edition Laserdisc version is surprisingly more accurate, with the green background in the opening, and the subtle color changes occurring later on. The Special Edition team (consisting of volunteer "Mad World" experts from around the country) had MGM/UA pull a 70mm print for the correct colors.
Fans on message boards such as us.imdb.com have listed the differences between the TCM and DVD versions, since the DVD's deleted scenes are not properly organized to explain their context and some scenes are essentially the same as seen on the DVD, only extended with a bit of material. However, even without the deleted scenes the current DVD version contains what general audiences saw in 1963.
According to one fan's analysis of the TCM extended version (70mm 2.55:1 aspect ratio) and the DVD theatrical version (35mm 2.35:1 aspect ratio):
It has been rumored that Kramer's original cut lasted more than five hours. This has been verified by Kramer's widow, Karen Sharpe Kramer, who was involved in locating the original 192-minute premiere version for release on VHS.
The film was broadcast in high definition for the first time on April 1, 2010 on MGM HD. This version contained the full overture and exit music, but no intermission music (it only used the music leading into the intermission).
The film was shown on TCM & TCMHD on July 6, 2010. This version contained the full overture, intermission music, and exit music.
The film was first released on VHS and LaserDisc by CBS/FOX Video in 1985 at the 154-minute running time. In 1990, MGM/UA Home Video released a restored video version of the film on VHS and LaserDisc incorporating all 20 minutes of the deleted footage that was available at that time, and including a documentary about the making of the film. The same company again released the movie on VHS five years later in stereo, letterbox, with a running time of 182 minutes (which includes the 20 minutes of extra footage, the opening, intermission and exit music), bonus trailer, but without the documentary. In 2001, MGM Home Entertainment released the film on two-sided DVD with the deleted scenes included as extras. In 2003, MGM Home Entertainment released another DVD of the film, a one-sided disc containing no extras. On July 5, 2011, a Blu-ray was released as a Walmart exclusive with a feature running time of 159 minutes. The special features include the Something a Little Less Serious documentary, extended scenes, theatrical trailer and reissue trailer.
The film was promoted as the first film made in "one-projector" Cinerama. (The original Cinerama process filmed scenes with three separate cameras. The three processed reels were projected by three electronically synchronized projectors onto a huge curved screen.) One camera Cinerama could be Super Panavision or Ultra Panavision, which was essentially the Super Panavision process with anamorphic compression at the edges of the image to give a much wider aspect ratio. When projected by one projector, the expanded 70mm image filled the wide Cinerama screen. Ultra Panavision was used to film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World; other films shot in Ultra Panavision and released in Cinerama include scenes of How The West Was Won, Battle of the Bulge and Khartoum. Super Panavision films released in Cinerama include 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ice Station Zebra.
Kramer's comedy was accentuated by many things, including the animated credits that open the movie, designed by Saul Bass: the film begins with mention of Spencer Tracy, then the 'in alphabetical order' mention of nine of the supporting cast (Berle, Caesar, Hackett, Merman, Rooney, Shawn, Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Winters), followed by hands switching these nine names two to three times over. Animation continues with paper dolls and a windup toy world spinning with several men hanging on to it and finishing with a man opening a door to the globe and getting trampled by a mad crowd. One of the animators who helped with the sequence was future 'Peanuts' animator Bill Melendez, whose name appeared in the aforementioned explosion of names.
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World had its world premiere at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, California on November 7, 1963, on the Dome's own opening night. The East Coast premiere was on November 17, 1963, at the Warner Cinerama Theatre in Times Square, New York City.[14] The day before, the film was shown in a special charity preview to benefit the Kennedy Child Study Center and the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Institute.[15] JFK sent his brother Bobby to the East Coast premiere instead of attending with his wife Jacqueline and would be assassinated less than a week later in Dallas.[16]
Distinguished by the largest number of stars to appear in a film comedy, Mad World opened to acclaim from many critics and tremendous box office receipts, becoming the highest grossing American film of 1963, quickly establishing itself as one of the top 100 highest-grossing films of all time when adjusted for inflation. The film's great success inspired Kramer to direct and produce Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (also starring Tracy and also written by William Rose) and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (also scored by Gold and also co-written by William Rose).
The film won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing and received Oscar nominations for its cinematography, film editing, sound recording (Gordon E. Sawyer), music score and title song.[17] and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Picture (Comedy) and for Jonathan Winters' performance as Best Actor.
The film was recognized by the American Film Institute.
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||