Tag: movies

Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder are one of the great comic movie duos.

But the strange thing is, as much affection as I have for the Wilder/Pryor team, they never truly made a great movie together – instead, they typically livened up fair to mediocre material with their unmistakable chemistry.

It’s a funny thing – other comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy or Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau paired for piles of movies, many of them classics, but Wilder and Pryor’s legacy is a paltry four films together – with, really, about 1.75 good movies among those.

Yet a lot of us comedy fans love them – Indicator has just put out a great lavish new box set of three of the Pryor-Wilder movies with the full boutique blu-ray treatment, usually reserved for cinematic masterpieces. Long after both men have died, the Pryor/Wilder team have a reputation that outshines their actual accomplishments on screen. 

Maybe it’s because their pairings always felt sincere – they weren’t doing Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis-style “bits,” but Wilder and Pryor took their existing quirks and crashed them together, which at its best created something that felt intimate instead of staged. They were better than their material, and maybe that charm is why we still remember them even when few are calling their movies masterpieces. 

1976’s Silver Streak is a movie I fell in love with after its countless TV screenings back in the day. A feisty homage to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, it’s amusing fluff which abruptly changes gears more than halfway through its runtime when Richard Pryor pops up in the back seat of a cop car and quickly becomes a sidekick to Wilder’s mild-mannered writer caught up in a vast criminal plot. 

Sometimes movies don’t go how you would expect, and Pryor and Wilder had a seamless energy that immediately pushed all the plots of Silver Streak to one side. I dig Silver Streak in the way you still love any movie you adored as a kid, but it’s a bolted-together contraption that isn’t sure whether it’s a romance, comedy, action movie or a disaster movie with its blow-up-the-train climax. 

Pryor loved to improvise and Wilder, to his credit, just went along with it, which gives their interactions a refreshingly candid feel. The rather dated scene where an on-the-lam Wilder goes full blackface with shoe polish to hide from police was tremendously improved by Pryor’s wry asides and Wilder’s child-like innocence. It’s a dumb scene, sure, but 10-year-old me thought it was hilarious and I still see it as making fun of white folks’ preconceptions as much as it relies on Black stereotypes. That one sequence launched the Pryor/Wilder career, and it came out of Pryor deciding to make the rather racist scene his own. Pryor adds an unpredictable feeling to his every scene in Silver Streak that knocks it out of its comedy thriller cliches. 

Gene Wilder’s schtick was often men who appear soft-spoken and shy but who snap, hilariously, when the pressure comes on. Wilder could be unsettlingly calm and slightly menacing – see his terrific underplaying in Blazing Saddles, his unmistakable Willy Wonka – but in movies with Pryor he plays the gentle man with a manic side. 

Their best film together is 1980’s Stir Crazy, where Wilder’s wide-eyed optimist and Pryor’s weary worrier end up wrongfully sent to prison. Like all their films, Stir Crazy is patchy – there’s wayyyyy too much prison rodeo subplot – but when Wilder and Pryor just riff off each other behind bars, it’s comedy heaven. 

Pryor’s characters toyed with racial stereotypes – he’s usually a hustler or a con man, a cynic without any of Wilder’s naive optimism – but the Pryor/Wilder movies only occasionally made race their main focus. In Stir Crazy, the fact a black guy and a white guy are good pals isn’t anything special – it’s just the way it is. 

I loved Silver Streak and Stir Crazy and watched them constantly as a kid, without ever really realising both Pryor and Wilder had already forged legendary careers of their own. Maybe that’s part of why their team still is so adored today despite a thin legacy together – nobody really thinks about Bud Abbott’s career before he met Costello, but Pryor and Wilder were already groundbreaking on their own before they paired up.

Still, their final two films were both box office misses and didn’t offer much new. 1989’s See No Evil, Hear No Evil has a dated concept that probably wouldn’t fly today – Pryor is a blind man, Wilder is a deaf man, with lots of wacky misunderstandings, and they get embroiled in a comic murder plot. While it’s a steep step down from Stir Crazy it’s absurdly funny at several points, until it meanders off into the dull murder storyline too much. 

While their first three movies are flawed, 1991’s slapdash Another You is just generally a fiasco, with a nonsensical plot and both men showing their age. Poor Richard Pryor – barely 50 years old at the time – was thin and frail, showing the effects of his onset of multiple sclerosis, and while Wilder still summons up that great manic energy, he also feels a bit past his use-by date. You know your movie’s bad when it relies on a yodelling scene for laughs. The highlight is a candid little “farewell” moment by the two men at the movie’s end. 

It’s kind of easy to look at Pryor/Wilder movies and lament their missed potential – poor scripts, needlessly complicated stories, too much of their work coming at the raggedy end of their careers. What could’ve been if instead of jamming them into belabored crime and action movie plots, they just riffed on their two very different characters? Imagine what they could’ve done with their versions of The Odd Couple or Planes, Trains and Automobiles, for instance.

Pryor would die at 65 in 2005, after spending his last several years as an invalid, while Wilder lived until 2016, but Another You was the final movie either men starred in, and a bit of a downer ending to their remarkable screen careers.

Pryor and Wilder weren’t particularly close in real life, which makes their unforced charm together on screen even more remarkable. Sometimes, a spark just happens. Comedy fans recognise the peculiar magic of the Pryor-Wilder combo and even if they didn’t leave the loftiest cinematic legacy behind, what they did leave behind in laughs is pure gold. 

There’s just something about Walter Matthau that gives a movie a little kick to me. 

Matthau had a face like an unmade bed, and his jowly face was called “hangdog” more times than you can count. But he was also a surprisingly malleable actor, a top-notch character actor who slowly worked his way into leading man roles. 

Matthau’s reputation settled in as the cranky curmudgeon often paired with his pal Jack Lemmon in movies like The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men (still one of my favourite ‘comfort viewing’ flicks), but for a while there in the ‘60s and ‘70s he tried being a rumpled action hero of sorts, playing both cops and crooks in a series of gritty classics. 

The 1970s saw the grand blossoming of leading men who didn’t all look like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty – Dustin Hoffman’s twitchy angst, Al Pacino’s angry passion, Gene Hackman’s everyman intensity. Matthau, who remained seen as a primarily comic actor, never quite comfortably rose into those ranks, but he could have. 

Before he pivoted more to comedy in his final years before his death in 2000, Matthau gave a witty spark of realism to movies like The Taking Of Pelham 123, Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman and Hopscotch, all fun spins on traditional crime tales. 

Matthau could be very menacing and played the villain a fair bit, in earlier gems like the Hitchockian Cary Grant starring Charade or the apocalyptic Fail-Safe. Hell, he even got into a fistfight with Elvis Presley in King Creole! 

His brief turn as a kind of action hero, though, often makes me wonder what if he’d stuck to that genre. The 1974 Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 remains a great, tense ride, as gunmen take a New York subway train hostage and Matthau, an unimposing traffic cop, ends up caught in the middle. Like an early run at Die Hard, it’s one of the great “unexpected hero” hostage dramas. 

The Laughing Policeman from 1973 is one of those wonderfully sleazy downbeat San Francisco crime movies of the era, opening with a still-shocking massacre on a bus. Like its thematic cousin Dirty Harry, it’s filled with grim period detail, although IMHO it loses its way a bit with a sluggish and kind of problematic final act wrap for its central mystery.

In 1973’s Charley Varrick and 1980’s Hopscotch, Matthau leans on his comic scoundrel side to winning effect. His Varrick is a smartly confident bank robber in a zesty neo-noir, while in the underrated satire Hopscotch he’s a former CIA agent who goes rogue and basically devotes himself to trolling his former bosses in a globe-trotting hoot. 

But unlike Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Matthau is never a swaggering alpha male, although he can be grumblingly sexist and arrogant like many a ‘70s male movie lead.

In his brief run at action hero stardom, the 50-something Matthau of the 1970s still feels oddly fresh and novel. It was an era where many of the staid conventions of American films were being shaken up, and having a guy who looked kind of like a worn-out off-duty office manager playing thieves, cops and con men just worked. 

There’s still something soothing for me about watching Matthau’s unpolished nonchalance amble about in a movie, and I like to think in a parallel universe, Matthau-starring versions of gritty flicks like The French Connection and Chinatown would’ve blown my mind. 

Everyone knows Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but if you’re truly down to explore the dense world of martial arts movies, you might want to dive a little deeper. 

And there you might just discover Cynthia Rothrock – a petite, charmingly unpretentious all-American blonde from Delaware who managed to fight her way into the heart of classic ’80s Hong Kong action movies, kicking up the screens with folks like Michelle Yeoh and Yuen Biao. 

Unlike her future Oscar-winning Yes, Madam co-star Yeoh, Rothrock didn’t go on to mega-stardom, but she’s still a cult heroine amongst those of us who like a good, non-CGI enhanced brawl on film.  

Rothrock is no casual actor with a martial arts hobby – she’s earned seven black belts and was a top martial arts competitor before ending up in films. In her debut, Yes, Madam, she tore up the screen with Yeoh, elevating a middling movie into something near-great, and the two of them fought in an all-timer classic climax brawl where they move like liquid fire: 

Rothrock went on to star in a bunch of Hong Kong films, often dubbed, typically as the brash white Yankee counterpart to her Asian male co-stars in movies like Righting Wrongs or brawling with legendary Sammo Hung in Millionaires Express:

Yet while her Hong Kong flicks were pretty legendary in certain circles, they never quite translated into mainstream fame – she nearly did a movie with Sylvester Stallone, which could’ve been amazing. Often she was relegated to glorified cameos where she’d pop up for a scene or two, do some stunningly elegant action and vanish. She’d often be the best part of the movies she appeared in. 

Eventually, back in America, she began appearing in a steady stream of what were once known as “direct to video” action flicks with titles like Sworn To Justice and Angel of Fury. These movies don’t quite have the manic energy of the Hong Kong movies but Rothrock is almost always a delight when she gets a chance to kick ass. 

She attempted to get a franchise going with the very enjoyable China O’Brien series, and appeared in the absolutely unhinged Undefeatable, which combines schlock with shock to serve up an all-time kung-sploitation revenge cheesefest with a gory final battle that went viral online and only hints at the sheer over-the-top insanity of this movie: 

I’ll admit, Rothrock isn’t always the strongest actress – there’s a few times in her films when she’s called upon to break down in emotional tears and it’s pretty cringe – but she’s got an easygoing, relaxed presence. To be blunt, she seems cool and approachable, someone you’d want to hang out with. It’s hard to imagine just chilling with Bruce Lee or Sonny Chiba.

And I’m enough of a feminist ally to say it still seems refreshing to watch Rothrock dance onto the screen and thump men twice her size with ease. Vintage martial arts movies, despite breakthrough stars like Yeoh, can still often be pretty sexist and dated by today’s standards, but Rothrock always did her part to kick back hard against being put into a box. 

As the ‘90s rolled on Rothrock’s movies generally got worse and cheaper and she slowed down a bit with age, but she’s still very much out there, with a devoted fanbase and an ever-growing appreciation for her place in action movie history. 

And of course, it’s long since been proved that women can kick ass – Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, The Matrix’s Carrie Anne Moss, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 and many more. 

But whether they know it or not, many of these awesome women were following in the footsteps of Rothrock, who might just be the greatest American female action star many people have never heard of.