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There is really nothing funny about a dead man and his corpse. Yet occasionally corpses happen to be the subject of humor. There was the amusing film (based on a Robert Louis Stevenson novel) THE WRONG BOX, which was elegantly done, and was quite good. There was Alfred Hitchcock's attempt at a totally funny black comedy regarding hiding a dead body in New England, called THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY. And best of all was this 1989 comedy about a body that takes on a "life" of it's own.
Hitchcock's fans insist THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY is one of his greatest films. It isn't. It demonstrates that Hitchcock's sense of humor was best used as a seasoning. A good example: in FRENZY the trouble the Scotland Yard Inspector had with his wife's "continental" cooking attempts. Every now and then the action leaves the scenes involving the suspect and the real killer and the victims, and we watch the poor Inspector discussing the case with his wife (who makes some good suggestions) while they eat all sorts of concoctions that the poor man loathes. It is not a bad running joke - but it is not the main theme of the film.
The main theme of THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY was that a number of people in a New England town all have had problems with Harry. The joke is how each of these people tries to hide the corpse, alone or with each other. They are helped by the stupidity of the local sheriff.
The problem is that Hitch's originality and inventiveness began to fade in the film. After all, how many times can you show people hiding a body and make it funny? And this was the actual plot - not a sideline to the plot.
In THE WRONG BOX there were other strands (the antics of Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Ralph Richardson, and John Mills in different directions - frequently at cross purposes). The fact the body gets mislaid, when it is at the center of the plot of Cook and Moore, concerning a tontine. The corresponding scheme of Mills trying to get rid of his rival Richardson for the tontine. In short the body is an element, but not the center of the joke.
WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S changed this. The corpse is the center and movement of the plot, but screenplay writer Robert Klane and director Ted Kotchoff realized what THE WRONG BOX showed, and what Hitch missed. The key of the use of a dead body as a matter of humor is not hiding the body, but producing it. In THE WRONG BOX it is hidden by various people, for different reasons, but several (Cook and Moore) plan to produce it at a given moment - and can't. In short the body has movement despite being a body. Hitch just kept having the body of Harry dug up and moved to another grave several times - movement it's true, but repetitive movement at best. One exception, but a meaningless one - when Harry's body is put into the bathtub in Shirley MacLaine's house. Why should it be in the tub? Hitch never really gave a reasonable reason for that.
In WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S Klane and Kotchoff solved this by creating the necessity of making people believe the dead Bernie is not dead.
Terry Kaiser is Bernie Lomax, the head of a large company that Andrew McCarthy (as Larry Waters) and Jonathan Silverman (as Richard Parker) work for as accountants. They discover a huge discrepancy in the books, and make the mistake of trusting this information to Bernie. They don't realize he and his partner have been looting the company. Bernie invites them to his home in the Hamptons for the weekend (where he secretly plans to bump them off). What he does not realize is that his partner has decided to bump him off, so Don Calfa (as Pacho, the hit-man) shoots Bernie, and leaves his corpse in the house. He thinks that the two visitors or someone else will report the finding of the dead body.
When Waters and Parker show up, they discover the dead man, and they are aware of his plot against them. Should they call the police? They decide they would be suspected. So the best thing is to make it appear that Bernie is still alive, and that he is having an active, fun-filled weekend with the two fellows. With plenty of people seeing and "speaking" to Bernie during the weekend, they will make sure that when they leave, nobody will suspect them. Of course, as time passes, Pacho can't understand the failure of anyone to discover the murder. He keeps returning and "killing" the living Bernie again and again and again. But Bernie keeps surviving to be seen limboing, swimming, and even water-skiing (my favorite part of the film).
From a comedy about a dead body it becomes a comedy about frustration for the gunman, and of inventiveness by the two young heroes. It also is a smörgåsbord of prat falls, blows to the head, and unnatural natural accidents for actor Terry Kaiser. His performance as the all too lively when dead Bernie is one of the funniest silent comic jobs in recent movies, as his semi-smile and sunglasses make him seem crocked more than dead to everyone dancing on the beach front at his house. It is certainly more interesting than that of the actor who was "Harry" in Hitch's film - who just had to lay on the ground or get carried somewhere. Again, a clever grasp of the possibilities of the situation in reverse, in a well written and directed film like BERNIE'S, beats out the unimaginative use of the corpse as a simple prop even if the director is (otherwise) a master of cinema elsewhere.
score 10/10
theowinthrop 21 June 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1399133/ |
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20-2-2020 09:05:22
