Killing Time with "The In-Laws"

I was startled to learn that the great Alan Arkin, a late-in-life Oscar winner for his irascible grandpa role in Little Miss Sunshine, once thought he was no good at comedy. After all, he‘d burst into the public eye with his wildly funny Oscar-nominated performance as a Russian submarine officer stranded off the New England coast in 1966’s The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. (Arkin lost to Paul Scofield’s dead-serious performance as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.) A true character actor, Arkin followed up Russians with a variety of roles: as a deaf-mute in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a bereaved Puerto Rican dad in Popi, and a thug who terrorizes poor, blind Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. Eventually it occurred to him that he could be successfully funny on-screen . . .  and that he and Peter Falk would make for an ideal pairing. Hence The In-Laws, a 1979 farce that had me in stitches.

 A plot summary doesn’t do justice to the zaniness of this film. The basic premise is that two in-laws-to-be (Arkin as a meek dentist, Falk as a shifty con-man type) must go on the lam on the brink of their children’s wedding. I’m still a bit confused by the theft that sets the plot in motion, and by the true nature of the Falk character’s hush-hush affiliation with good guys and bad. But what’s pure gold is the developing relationship between two opposites who suddenly need to work together in the direst of circumstances.

 A few glimmers of this film’s hilarity: 

·       A masked thug, fresh from a heist, hands over his loot to Falk on a rooftop, while both matter-of-factly exchange pleasantries about family doings

·       Falk whisks Arkin out of his Manhattan office to break into a safe, leaving behind a matron who obligingly waits in the dental chair for his return, her mouth stuffed with cotton, while conscientiously obeying instructions not to bite down

·       A panicked Arkin, escaping a police raid, zips into a drive-through spray paint establishment, only to find his luxury sedan permanently adorned with flames.

·       Aboard a rickety private plane bound for South America, the ageless James Hong (yes, he was the elderly father in Everything Everywhere All at Once), gives the passenger-safety spiel in Cantonese and pantomime, panicking Arkin even more

·       Arkin and Falk end up on a South American island run by a manic general (the priceless Richard Libertini) who has a most unusual sidekick. (It gives new meaning to the phrase, “Talk to the hand.”)

 Farce is not easy, and I suspect that the examples above, when spelled out in print, might sound dumb rather than amusing. But under the astute direction of veteran Arthur Hiller, Arkin and Falk are so committed to the reality of this insanity that the viewer is rooting for them all the way.  When Stanley Kramer tried to create the funniest movie ever made, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, he loaded it so full of shtick, not to mention famous comic actors, that the audience (me) was not amused. Mad Mad World was a whopping 3 ½ hours long, and there was so much going on, in so many different screwball styles, that the film felt exhausting. The In-Laws (half as long, with an able but much smaller cast) is, for me, laugh-out-loud funny, and I know many in Hollywood  have felt the same.

 Which is why there was a 2003 remake, featuring another amusingly odd couple: Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks. It was a total flop. Don’t be fooled by imitations.