It's In the Bag Blu-ray Review
The Five Chairs.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 14, 2013
Fred Allen is a name that may well not be familiar to many, maybe even
most, who are reading this, but he was
once one of America's hottest comedians, with a long running top rated radio show (not to mention copious credits in
vaudeville and Broadway). Allen had a hangdog demeanor, as
well as huge bags under his eyes (which were frequently the butt of his own jokes), but he had one of the sharpest
comedic minds of his (or frankly any) generation. Revisiting Allen's routines now is like an object lesson in brilliant satire
and the sort of "meta" approach that has defined many contemporary stand up comedians. Allen would regularly
deconstruct everything about him, whether that be his supposed feud with Jack Benny (who appears in one of several
cameo appearances in
It's In the Bag!) or indeed whatever medium in which he found himself working. That
approach is front and center right off the bat in
It's in the Bag, where the credits start to unfurl and then are
quickly brought to a screeching halt by Allen himself, looking straight into the camera and addressing the audience as a
sort of "fellow traveler", lamenting the fact that they, and by extension he, have to sit through all these meaningless
names in order to get to the actual film. Allen then does an absolutely hilarious line by line decimation of the various
talent involved in the film, wondering aloud "Who
are these people?" when the supporting cast card is shown,
and later claiming that a number of the technical personnel got their jobs simply because they were relatives of the
producer. It's one of the smartest, sharpest openings of any comedy film from any era in film, and if the rest of
It's
in the Bag! doesn't
quite come up to that level of hilarity, there are still plenty of guffaws to be had in what
was Fred Allen's only major film starring role.
Mel Brooks' long career is now perhaps best remembered for films like
Young Frankenstein,
Blazing Saddles and
The Producers, which Brooks himself musicalized and brought to
Broadway, creating an epic Tony Award winning hit (I had the pleasure of conducting a gargantuan production of the
show
here in Portland where I live). True Brooks aficionados will remember one of Mel's films which strangely hasn't attained
the same status as others in the writer-director's
oeuvre, 1970's
The Twelve Chairs, a madcap farce
starring Frank Langella, Dom DeLuise and Ron Moody. The basic setup of the film is that a sizable fortune has been
stashed in one of twelve chairs from an antique dining set, but the chairs have all been disbursed to different place and
different owners, and a motley crew of fortune hunters then races to discover where the stash is (rather like
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World). While American audiences might be most familiar with this old story (based upon a Russian novel
which
came out in 1928) in its Brooks version, it has actually made it to films no less than eighteen times in various
adaptations from different
countries through the intervening decades. Though missing more than a half dozen of the original seating
configuration,
It's in the Bag! is indeed one of those adaptations.
It's in the Bag! ups the ante just slightly by having Allen's character, Fred Floogle, becoming a suspect in his
granduncle's murder. It soon becomes apparent (to the audience if not the bumbling police) that the actual culprits are
the law firm and business partners of the deceased man, including a lunatic attorney played by none other than John
Carradine. Fred and his wife Eve (Binnie Barnes, seemingly channeling Joan Davis) initially think Fred, operator of a Flea
Circus, has come into
an astounding twelve million, and begin living high on the hog. They also start planning an elaborate wedding for their
daughter Marion (Gloria Pope, evidently in one of only two film appearances she made), who is engaged to the son of a
kind of shifty supposed aristocrat (Robert Benchley) who, it turns out, is little
more than a pest control expert.
Once the will is read and Fred and Marion find out that the money is supposedly gone and they've only inherited five
chairs, they're obviously distraught. A mysterious record is delivered to them (one great gag that probably very few will
get involves Fred playing the "A" side), but when they turn the 78 over they discover a secret message from their
murdered relative. Some loot has been stashed in one of the chairs, but of course Fred has
just sent his
precocious young son to sell them to a local auction house. The rest of the film finds Fred and Marion trying to track
down all five chairs while they're simultaneously followed by a cop (Sidney Toler of the Monogram
Charlie Chan
films) and various bad guys.
The film plays like a bunch of just slightly connected sketches, and as with most sketch comedy, some bits hit and some
miss. The hits include a great little scene with Jack Benny, Allen's long running radio nemesis. Benny has of course
gotten one of the chairs, and Fred pretends to be the President of Nutley, New Jersey's Jack Benny Fan Club. Fred
soon finds out, however, that even being a fan doesn't keep Jack from charging for everything from storing Allen's hat
to Fred getting some cigarettes. Other bits, like Jerry Colonna's over the top psychiatrist, haven't aged particularly well.
Some are kind of middling, as in a too long bit where Fred and Marion attempt to pass the time by going to a movie,
only to discover they can't find a seat. One rather odd bit has Fred becoming a singing waiter at a "Naughty Nineties"
revue where the other performers are Don Ameche and Rudy Vallee, playing themselves.
There are some decidedly politically incorrect moments scattered throughout the film, including Fred and his son
adopting Chinese dialects while they squint their eyes, and a reference to "Shylock" that isn't exactly anti-Semitic but
comes awfully close. There's a longer routine with a Jewish lady named Pansy Nussbaum that is undeniably funny but
which might strike some contemporary audiences as kind of questionable. One of the funnier elements of the film is
actually completely tangential: keep an eye on Binnie Barnes' hair. There are literally no two scenes, including those
which are supposedly chronological, where she doesn't sport a different (and sometimes quite elaborate) hairstyle.
