By Richard Winters
My Rating: 3 out of 10
4-Word Review: Robbing with laughing gas.
Dudley (Elliot Gould) sacrifices his body to be a guinea pig for the army’s tests. All their latest warfare weapons get used on him first to see how effective they are. He feels he’s doing it to help his country and therefore doesn’t mind the toll that it takes, but as his health declines his superior officer Col. Lockyer (Eddie Albert) realizes that they’re going to have to find someone else to replace him. Dudley is offered a small monthly disability payment, which he feels won’t be enough to survive on. He tries to get other jobs to supplement his measly income but is unable to hold any of them down. He then meets a former fellow test subject Chops (Harry Guardino) at a bar and the two concoct a plan to rob banks using the nerve gas that Dudley has snuck out of the military facility. The scheme is, with the help of a crop-duster named Dusty (Godfrey Cambridge), to spray the gas onto the town’s population, which will disable the folks for certain amount of time and give the two a chance to take the money without any impediment. Trouble ensues when Lockyer catches on to what they’re doing and becomes determined to stop them by bringing in the military.
Screenwriter Malcolm Marmorstein, who wrote also wrote the script for S*P*Y*S, which came out a year before, learned from his mistakes from that one making this a slight improvement. The protagonist has a better arc and the plot is more concretely structured. The humor’s focus is improved as it takes some major potshots at the armed forces and it also manages to have a normal character, as in Dudley’s nurse girlfriend Scottie (Jennifer O’Neill) who is sensible and relatable to the viewer. It features a great performance by Guardino, who’s effective particularly as he riles in pain during one of the tests, but still manages somehow to continue his conversation with Gould. This is also not quite as silly as the other one as it ventures into some dark areas though at times it gets a bit difficult to keep laughing when you witness what terrible, painful things the army gets the two test subjects to agree to.
The main weakness comes in the form of the main character who’s likable enough, but not particularly relatable. I’ll give Gould credit for going against type and taking on a role that was way different from any of the ones he did before. Usually, he played caustic intellectuals who would routinely question and challenge authority, but here he’s a passive simp that does whatever he’s asked without argument, but this then becomes part of the problem. No sane person would agree to allow their bodies to go through such a battering even if it was for the ‘good of the country’ and thus it becomes confusing why Gould would put up with it for so long and the viewer is unable to connect emotionally with his quandary as much as they should.
Spoiler Alert!
The ending doesn’t pack much of a punch and becomes boring just as the tension should’ve been heightening. The idea that Gould decides to drug the whole town just to rob a bank didn’t make much sense as they could’ve easily just used it on the bank employees, which would’ve taken up much less time and effort and not attracted all the needless attention. It also comes off as disingenuous that Gould, who spends the majority of the film being a dope who can’t seem to think for himself, would then suddenly become so cunning as he quickly, on the spur of the moment, comes up with crafty ways to outfox those that are chasing them, but if he was so smart then why did he stupidly subject himself to being the army’s guinea pig for so long? He wasn’t even the one who came up with using the gas to rob the banks in the first place as that idea came from Guardino, so if the story were going to be consistent then Guardino should’ve been the one who continues to do the thinking while Gould would simply take the orders like he had through the first two acts.
Having Gould then jump off Dusty’s crop duster plane just as it’s taking the three men to the safety of Mexico, so he can instead have sex with O’Neil, as his impotency miraculously gets cured, isn’t a satisfying payoff. During the early part of the decade watching two people copulate onscreen in unusual places might’ve been deemed edgy and irreverent, but by this point it had been done too many times, making the moment here, no pun intended, anti-climactic. It would’ve worked better had the sex stuff been written out and O’Neill just been a part of the robbery versus having her disappear for long periods as she does here.
My Rating: 3 out of 10
Released: October 15, 1975
Runtime: 1 Hour 32 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Ted Post
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Available: DVD-R
Scopophilia 