Thu 9 Jun 2016
A PAIR OF MIDDLE EAST COLD WAR SEX FARCES: Two Movie Reviews by David Vineyard.
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[13] Comments
JOHN GOLDFARB, PLEASE COME HOME. 20th Century Fox, 1965. Shirley MacLaine, Peter Ustinov, Richard Crenna, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Scott Brady, Harry Morgan, Jerome Cowan, Telly Savalas, Jackie Coogan, Charles Lane, Leonid Askin, Richard Deacon, Jerry Orbach. Screenplay: William Peter Blatty. Director: J. Lee Thompson.
YOU KNOW WHAT SAILORS ARE! General Films, UK, 1954; United Artists, US, 1954. Akim Tamiroff, Donald Sinden, Sarah Lawton, Naunton Wayne, Bill Kerr, Dora Bryan, Martin Miller, Michael Shepley, Ferdy Mayne, Shirley Eaton (unbilled). Screenplay by Peter Rogers, based on the novel Sylvester by Edward Hyams. Director: Ken Annakin.
These two films, done a little over a decade apart, are both cold war satires and sex farces set against a never never land of exotic Middle Eastern Arab states (more Grand Duchy of Fenwick than Graustark) and broadly drawn caricatures of both Western and Mid-Eastern types. One is a pleasant, even charming comedy with real laughs and sex appeal, the other is John Goldfarb, Please Come Home.
Starting with the brassy and annoying title song sung by Shirley MacLaine, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home sets the tone for the entire film, loud, obvious, and painful to endure. Fawzia is a fictional Arab state run by eccentric King Fawz (Peter Ustinov at his absolute worst doing incredibly unfunny and offensive slapstick) who is upset his darling son has been kicked off the football team at Notre Dame and wants revenge.
When U2 pilot, John “Wrongway†Goldfarb (Richard Crenna “He said, funny, you don’t look Jewish.â€) manages to ditch over Fawzia on a mission over the U.S.S.R. (they don’t call him Wrongway for nothing), and King Fawz learns from his chief minister Gus (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that Goldfarb was a football star and coach, — well you can see where this is going — and nowhere fast.
Meanwhile obnoxious harridan reporter Jenny Ericson (Shirley MacLaine), who gave Goldfarb his hated nickname, has gone undercover in King Fawz harem only to find the old boy is more active than she was told and she is anxious to maintain her amateur standing blackmailing Goldfarb into protecting her.
All this leading to one of those hate turns to romance things so beloved by script writers and here wholly unlikely as the only proper reaction to MacLaine’s character would be homicide and not chivalry. This film really doesn’t like women. It doesn’t like anyone much, but it really dislikes women, the harem consisting of gold diggers with no self esteem whatsoever. Women exist only as sex objects, and the only vaguely intelligent one is a screaming shrieking harpy with a shrill laugh and all the charm of a scorpion.
I like MacLaine, in fact I like everyone involved in making this film including the screenwriter and director, but what any of them were thinking escapes me. This film is an almost physical assault from start to finish, the cinematic equivalent of being slapped in the face with a wet dead fish repeatedly.
Back in Washington the boys (Secretary of State Harry Morgan, CIA chief Fred Clark, diplomat Jim Backus, Sec. of Defense Richard Deacon et al) think Goldfarb is dead, and are concerned about getting an airfield in Fawzia, but having recently presented the king with a set of pigskin luggage (yes, that’s the level of humor here) things are looking bad — unless they can persuade Notre Dame to play a game against Fawzia’s new team with their mystery coach, and Notre Dame loses …
Loud, often racist, rude, crude, painfully unfunny, sexist, silly, strident, and just awful are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind about this painful satire that makes Mad look subtle. There is something here to offend everyone including the total waste of talent. To give you the level of humor here, Fred Clark is the CIA director named Overreach and Jim Backus a diplomat named Whitepaper.
These are the jokes, folks …
I will give Scott Brady this, though. In a film with so many funny men and women being not funny he has a nice turn as the thoroughly flustered Notre Dame coach. It’s not much, but it’s something.
You Know What Sailors Are! starts with Lt. Sylvester Green (Donald Sinden) and friends, Royal Naval officers on a binge, who as a joke build a Rube Goldberg contraption from a pram and three gold balls from a pawn shop on the prow of an Arab destroyer in port and paint it gray. Come the next morning the Royal Navy spies the thing and before an hour has passed they have identified it as Project 998, a super-secret new radar, and want to know how the Arab’s got it first.
In short order Lt.Green is ordered to accompany the Arab ship back home to Agraria and find out from a brilliant scientist living in retirement there, Professor Hyman Pfumbaum (Mark Miller), how the Agrarians got the new radar, and he can hardly tell his superiors it’s a drunken joke.
Traveling with Sinden is the malaprop-dropping President of the Arab state, Akim Tamiroff, who believes 998 is a secret weapon, just what he needs against one of his militaristic neighbors, Smorgisgov, who have his country ringed by missiles, and who decides he must keep Lt. Green a prisoner, so he locks him ups in his harem of beautiful daughters watched over by his eccentric English wife (Dora Bryan) and an army of scantily clad beautiful girls as guards.
“He must be marrying one of my daughters, then everyone will be happy, myself excluded.â€
Things get more complicated as Tamiroff and his friend Hyman try to convince their neighbors that 998 actually works by blowing up Smorgsnigov’s missiles deceiving their foreign scientist Stanislaus Voritz (Ferdy Mayne) who has a thing for missiles, and Sylvester’s girl Betty(Sarah Lawton), secretary of his boss (Naunton Wayne) and best friend Lt. Smart (Bill Kerr) parachute into Argaria to break into the harem and rescue him before the Royal Navy gets too suspicious why he doesn’t come home.
You Know What Sailors Are! is genuinely funny, it’s barbs sharp but delivered with wit and not malice, and aimed at pretty much everyone with equal wit and warmth. Tamiroff’s fractured English is a delight — “Bang Crash Ruddy Wallop!†is how he describes his countries plight, and when he and his friend scientist Hyman meet to talk announcing “Let us both talk in broken English so we can misunderstand each other.†— and the girls are genuinely attractive.
There is a funny, but still sexy, musical number with Lawton posing as a dancer trying to capture Green’s attention that compares more than favorably to the jolting and unattractive numbers that dot John Goldfarb with little or no point other than MacLaine and skimpily clad models gyrating unattractively to bad music. You know a Hollywood movie is in trouble when it can’t even organize a sexy Arabian nights style faux belly dancing number.
You Know What Sailors Are! is a pleasant minor satirical diversion, sexist yes, but not jarringly so and not without intelligent and capable female characters, beautifully shot in soft pastel colors with a cast of attractive and talented people poking gentle barbs at themselves and others, probably offensive if you really want to get offended, but all done with such good humor and affection it would be hard to take real offense.
It comes across as a sort of Middle Eastern The Mouse That Roared. John Goldfarb, Please Come Home is a garish assault on the senses, eyes and ears, painfully arch, blatantly offensive, utterly without a redeeming feature, screechingly played at the top of everyone’s voice, and with all the charm and subtly of a herd of sexually frustrated camels stampeding through your china closet.
I’m recommending one of them. Guess which?
June 9th, 2016 at 10:46 am
Note that the screenplay’s by Wm Peter (EXORCIST) Blatty, who based the mother-daughter relationship in that novel on that of MacLaine and her daughter…
And while the rendition of the theme may be execrable, the theme are score are funny and playful, by John(ny) Williams.
June 9th, 2016 at 11:07 am
When John Goldfarb came out in 1965, my brother and I were in public high school, after eight years of Catholic grade school. Both of us were out to lose our “innocence” as quickly and painlessly as possible, and Sean had a friend (whose name I don’t really remember at this late date) who had the paperback tie-in of Goldfarb, from which he happily read us excerpts while waiting for the school bus.
Sean and I never got to see the movie in a theater (the Notre Dame lawsuit played havoc with the bookings); we had to wait until a couple of years later, when ABC ran a (presumably) TV-safe version in prime time.
We were both still teenagers, but even at that level of maturity, we recognized gorgonzola when we saw it …
By the way, you missed a couple of the better character names:
Harry Morgan’s Secretary of State was ‘Deems Sarajevo’.
Richard Deacon’s Secretary of Defense was ‘Maginot’.
To reasonably educated ’60s teenagers, I suppose that this passed for “sophisticated satire”.
By the other way, I’ve read that when the picture was first being put together the year before, the role of King Fawz was earmarked for Peter Lorre; his passing thus may be seen as mercy (my source is the recent Lorre biography, The Lost One.).
“More Than You Wanted To Know” continues …
June 9th, 2016 at 2:12 pm
Bill;
I was being kind and not mentioning John Williams. I didn’t even find the score witty on this, and absolutely hated the song which MacLaine pounds out in a nasal brassy twang to pseudo clever Middle Eastern themes. The musical cues were all of the most obvious kind.
I’ll give it this, save for the title song the score doesn’t intrude or make things worse.
But that’s horse races. No argument the music is the best and most professional part of the film.
As I said I admire almost everyone in the film or who worked on it. J. Lee Thompson directed CAPE FEAR and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE; Ustinov is a certifiable genius; MacLaine starred in some of my favorite films of all time; Crenna was the most underrated leading man of his time, a gifted dramatic and comedic actor; Wilfrid Hyde-White, Harry Morgan, Fred Clark, Jim Backus …
Some scenes in the palace are so bad I felt embarrassed for Wilfrid Hyde-White being in them. At the end when Crenna bows to Mecca and begins praying during the painfully unfunny football finale I wondered if he wasn’t praying for the prints to all be lost of this awful film.
As for Blatty I was a fan from KILLER KANE on and thought him a brilliant screenwriter, but on this … It’s a Blake Edwards sex farce desperately in need of Blake Edwards hand on the helm. This kind of thing take a delicate hand and here every gag is delivered with a pie in the face sledge hammer over the head style that leaves the viewer punch drunk.
I recognize we (and me personally) are more sensitive now than we were then, but even by the standard of the times this is an obnoxious film that is saved only by equally insulting Americans, Jews, Arabs, Catholics, civilians, the military, men, and especially women — even by the standard of the PLAYBOY lifestyle circa 1965 the film insults women. I’ve seen exploitation films from the same era that treated women better. Hell, THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS is a better film, David Friedman made better films.
Mike,
I was 15 when I saw it, and already a “man” so not quite as desperate, but even at 15 it didn’t take much for me to define this as the definition of “sophomoric” (and ironically I was one).
Thanks for the extra info.
I don’t think Lorre could have saved this, but at least the woman chasing would have been in character for him. Ustinov is not primarily a physical comic, and here the endless shtick grates. He does manage what I can only assume are a few tributes to Billy Gilbert with some of his double takes and faces, but endless shots of him running around the palace in his golf cart trying to catch Crenna and MacLaine not having sex so he can seduce her just are not funny, and the bits with his toy train set running throughout the palace wears out its welcome early.
JOHN GOLDFARB is the kind of film that has you yearning for the maturity and sophistication of Jerry Lewis.
June 9th, 2016 at 3:17 pm
Haven’t seen either film but LOVED the reviews; I thik that’s the mark of good writing — you enjoy reading it even if you don’t know the subject.
June 9th, 2016 at 8:47 pm
Yeah, the MacLaine/J. Lee Thompson pairing is a tough one. Not quite as dire in WHAT A WAY TO GO, but again a Blake Edwards or Billy Wilder should’ve answered the phone. Both of these films end in the leads being drenched by an oil gusher.
June 9th, 2016 at 10:11 pm
Fun With Casting:
– In re The Exorcist, I’ve read that the model for the drunk director played by Jack MacGowran was – J. Lee Thompson.
And further, that Thompson was actually offered the part – possibly by Blatty, who I guess was after revenge of a sort for Goldfarb.
June 10th, 2016 at 5:21 am
I’ve always had a vague memory of seeing JOHN GOLDFARB and, even as a teenager, recognizing just how truly awful and painfully unfunny it was in every way, but David said it way better than I could have.
I never heard of the other one, though I’m a big Donald Sinden fan.
June 10th, 2016 at 1:14 pm
Jeff, both are available on YouTube right now. Keep an eye out for Shirley Eaton among the harem girls in SAILOR.
Dan, if you haven’t seen GOLDFARB you are lucky. You have taken several for the team reviewing bad films, just consider this time I took one instead. Thanks for the kind words though.
There is a sort of train wreck quality to JGPCH at first. You keep thinking with all these wonderful people in it that it will somehow connect the dots and develop into something, but it never does.
At the time it got quite a bit of attention, I think PLAYBOY even did a big layout on the film, but even then a lot of critics savaged it and everyone involved, though it seems to have hurt Crenna’s film career disproportionately.
Mike, I had heard the Thompson rumor re GOLDFARB and THE EXORCIST, but having read Blatty’s book of the movie it is unfair to take Thompson and MacLaine to task alone. Blatty’s painfully unfunny script is as much to blame. No one could have turned that mess into a workable film with all those unfunny gags.
I think Blatty tried to lay off too much of the blame for GOLDFARB on others. He deserves an equal portion of the blame. As I said I read the novelization, and assuming it was based on the script by Blatty there was little there to work with save painfully unfunny and obvious satirical targets. He did much better in KILLER KANE, but you can see some of GOLDFARB even there. I’m not sure humor was the best use of his talents.
The reason I reviewed it with SAILOR was to contrast how the same basic material could be handled with some style and genuine humor still targeting the same broad targets (Culture clash, military mind set, Cold War worries), and still attacking them broadly.
The difference is that Blatty’s script and the film sneers and looks down on everyone including the hero and heroine, snarling and snapping like a nervous angry little dog at everyone’s ankles while Rogers script, and I assume the novel it is based on, pokes gentle affectionate fun.
Ustinov’s King Fawz is a sexual predator, a man child, a murderous petulant monster that as played in the film (and written in the book) comes across as a mix of Harpo Marx and Charles Manson. Akim Tamiroff’s President of Agraria is a smiling gentle and comical despot scheming to save his small country and both charming and ultimately sympathetic. Crenna’s Goldfarb is a whiny pathetic loser so inept and so victimized by his own incompetence you never once identify with him or his plight whereas Sinden’s Green is a likable none to bright but not actually dumb good guy out of his depth but getting by on wits and charm.
Add MacLaine, whose character leads me to suspect based on a reading of other Blatty works that he really does not like women much. She is shrill, brassy, vicious, a harpy, a self pitying, nasty, and in this film unattractive harpy. I’m not quite sure I can think of a less attractive female character and that includes Faye Dunnaway’s Joan Crawford in MOMMIE DEAREST and Liz Taylor in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINA WOOLF?. I certainly can’t think of another comedy with a lead as unattractive as MacLaine in this.
Bill, good catch on the oil gusher thing re WHAT A WAY TO GO. The latter is much less dire thanks to its cast and MacLaine far less shrill. WAWTG is fitful, parts of it work better than others, and it is no where near as painfully shrill as GOLDFARB, but parts of it do work.
There must have been a dozen directors better suited to GOLDFARB than Thompson. I can’t imagine what they were thinking, but I’m not sure a Ken Annakin, or Wilder, or Edwards, or any of the better choices could have done much better by that script.
Peter Lorre was lucky to have died before it rather than have that as his last film, though I can see him being better than Ustinov in the role.
June 10th, 2016 at 2:22 pm
Yes there was Playboy layout for the Goldfarb movie. Ustinov would be spying at the harem through a key shaped eye piece.
Now, if you really wanted to choose a better director, Russ Meyer comes to mind as someone who could have really made this work. Of course he would have had to submit to working with a full production crew. But you could image a funnier and sexier result.
June 10th, 2016 at 2:38 pm
When I first watched it decades ago on cable I found GOLDFARB funny, a mindless absurd comedy with no redeeming value other than it made me laugh.
Recently, I had the chance to see it again and did not last longer than the credits. A terrible movie and everything bad that has been said here is deserved. But sometimes even the worst movie can catch you in the right mood and frame of mind. Even if that frame of mind is temporary brain dead.
June 10th, 2016 at 7:12 pm
Michael,
I hated it when I saw it at 15, but likely missed half the gags. Years later I saw it on cable and wondered why I was so hard on it, then watched it the other day and remembered exactly what was so awful about it.
I might have lasted longer if I had come in past the credits. That song and performance over them would run anyone off.
June 12th, 2016 at 8:35 pm
Just to add to the insult, GOLDFARB is the kind of film that thinks Jewish and Arab football players is the height of humor, and goes downhill from there.
Matthew I recall that PLAYBOY layout now. It was about the only good thing about the movie. It gives some idea how bad GOLDFARB is that a keyhole peeping Arab cheesecake layout is less offensive than the film itself.
June 15th, 2016 at 4:23 am
I saw GOLDFARB on Boston’s Ch. 56 sometime in the ’70s, and found it every bit as bad as Leonard Maltin and Steven Scheuer & co. had warned, and noted that Blatty wrote it…not long after, I tried reading THE EXORCIST and found it clumsily-written, boring and easy to put down. I did so not far in. Haven’t gotten around to KILLER KANE nor his other work since.
Yeah, the more intense misogyny amid the misanthropy was hard to miss.