AFI Top Laughs

In 1964, with the Cuban Missile Crisis fresh in viewers' minds, the Cold War at its frostiest, and the hydrogen bomb relatively new and frightening, Stanley Kubrick dared to make a film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button -- and played the situation for laughs. Dr. Strangelove's jet-black satire (from a script by director Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern) and a host of superb comic performances (including three from Peter Sellers) have kept the film fresh and entertaining, even as its issues have become (slightly) less timely. Loaded with thermonuclear weapons, a U.S. bomber piloted by Maj. T.J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) is on a routine flight pattern near the Soviet Union when they receive orders to commence Wing Attack Plan R, best summarized by Maj. Kong as "Nuclear combat! Toe to toe with the Russkies!" On the ground at Burpleson Air Force Base, Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) notices nothing on the news about America being at war. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) calmly informs him that he gave the command to attack the Soviet Union because it was high time someone did something about fluoridation, which is sapping Americans' bodily fluids (and apparently has something to do with Ripper's sexual dysfunction). Meanwhile, President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) meets with his top Pentagon advisors, including super-hawk Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), who sees this as an opportunity to do something about Communism in general and Russians in particular. However, the ante is upped considerably when Soviet ambassador de Sadesky (Peter Bull) informs Muffley and his staff of the latest innovation in Soviet weapons technology: a "Doomsday Machine" that will destroy the entire world if the Russians are attacked. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Frank Capra's seminal screwball comedy, which won all five major Academy Awards for 1934, is still as breezy and beguiling today. Claudette Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who has married fortune-hunting aviator King Westley (Jameson Thomas), despite her father (Walter Connolly)'s objections. To keep Ellie from marrying this lothario, her father has been holding her prisoner aboard his yacht. But Ellie bolts from the yacht, swims ashore in her clothes, and eventually slips onto a Greyhound bus bound for New York. Aboard the bus is newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable), who has recently been fired for drinking on the job. Peter gets the last seat on the bus -- but when he gets up to argue with the bus driver, Ellie takes his seat. Since it is the last seat on the bus, they have to share it. When Ellie has her purse stolen and she refuses to report it, Peter begins to suspect something. The next morning, they both miss the bus after a leisurely breakfast, and Peter reveals that he knows her identity. She makes a deal with him: if he helps her get to New York, he can write a scoop about her for his paper. Peter thinks she is a spoiled brat, however, and refuses a monetary bribe: "I'm not interested in your money or your problem. You, King Westley, your father -- you're all a lot of hooey to me!" But as they travel northward and engage in a series of misadventures, the gruff newspaperman and the spoiled rich girl, thrown together by circumstances, fall in love with each other. This movie set the pace for the "screwball" comedy, the witty and romantic clash of temperaments between a man and a woman mismatched in both personality and social position, a type of movie often associated with Katherine Hepburn in such classics as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and, with Spencer Tracy, Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957), among others. The only other movies to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay) were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Theatrical producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) was once the toast of Broadway. Now he lives in his seedy office, cadging cash contributions from wealthy old ladies in exchange for sexual favors. Even worse, he's reduced to wearing a cardboard belt. Max's new accountant, Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), the soul of honesty, suggests that Max produce a hit to try to recoup his losses, but Max knows that it's too late for that. Offhandedly, Leo muses that, if Max found investors for a flop, he could legally keep all the extra money. Suddenly, Max's eyes light up -- and in that moment, Leo Bloom is gloriously corruptible. "I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!" cries Leo as Max embraces him. Together, Max and Leo conspire to select the worst play, the worst playwright, the worst director, and the worst actor to collaborate on their guaranteed flop. That play is Springtime for Hitler, "a delightful romp...with Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun." The playwright is Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars), an unreconstructed Nazi who, in drunken delirium, insists that Hitler was a better painter than Churchill -- "He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon, two coats!" The director is pompous transvestite Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewett), who is preparing to go to a costume party garbed as Marie Antoinette when Max and Leo come calling ("Max, Max, he's wearing a dress"). And the star, selected after extensive auditions, is hippie-freak Lorenzo St. DuBois (Dick Shawn) -- "L.S.D." for short.

At the end of several weeks, Max has sold 25,000 percent of the show; and, as a finishing touch, Max bribes the opening-night critics for a favorable review, knowing full well that such a gesture is the kiss of death. The curtains part, and Springtime for Hitler opens with perhaps the most tasteless production number in the history of films. At the end of this extravaganza, the audience sits in dumbfounded silence. Gleefully, Max and Leo repair to a corner bar to celebrate their failure. But then.... The first directorial effort of Mel Brooks, The Producers didn't do so well on its first release, but since that time it has taken its place as one of the all-time great movie comedies. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in this inspired comedy about a madcap heiress with a pet leopard who meets an absent-minded paleontologist and unwittingly makes a fiasco of both their lives. David Huxley (Grant) is the stuffy paleontologist who needs to finish an exhibit on dinosaurs and thus land a $1 million grant for his museum. At a golf outing with his potential benefactors, Huxley is spotted by Susan Vance (Hepburn) who decides that she must have the reserved scientist at all costs. She uses her pet leopard, Baby, to trick him into driving to her Connecticut home, where a dog wanders into Huxley's room and steals the vital last bone that he needs to complete his project. The real trouble begins when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and Baby is mistaken for it, leading Huxley and Susan into a series of harebrained and increasingly more insane schemes to save the cat from the authorities. Inevitably, the two end up in the local jail, where things get even more out of hand: Susan pretends to be the gun moll to David's diabolical, supposedly wanted criminal. Naturally, the mismatched pair falls in love through all the lunacy. Director Howard Hawks delivers a funny, fast-paced, and offbeat story, enlivened by animated performances from the two leads, in what has become a definitive screwball comedy. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Hollywood, 1927: the silent-film romantic team of Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) is the toast of Tinseltown. While Lockwood and Lamont personify smoldering passions onscreen, in real life the down-to-earth Lockwood can't stand the egotistical, brainless Lina. He prefers the company of aspiring actress Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), whom he met while escaping his screaming fans. Watching these intrigues from the sidelines is Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor), Don's best pal and on-set pianist. Cosmo is promoted to musical director of Monumental Pictures by studio head R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) when the talking-picture revolution commences. That's all right for Cosmo, but how will talkies affect the upcoming Lockwood-Lamont vehicle "The Dueling Cavalier"? Don, an accomplished song-and-dance man, should have no trouble adapting to the microphone. Lina, however, is another matter; put as charitably as possible, she has a voice that sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. The disastrous preview of the team's first talkie has the audience howling with derisive laughter. On the strength of the plot alone, concocted by the matchless writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Singin' in the Rain is a delight. But with the addition of MGM's catalog of Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown songs -- "You Were Meant for Me," "You Are My Lucky Star," "The Broadway Melody," and of course the title song -- the film becomes one of the greatest Hollywood musicals ever made. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In A Fish Called Wanda, Jamie Lee Curtis plays an ambitious con artist who uses every ounce of her sexual wiles to obtain a fortune in jewels stolen by her gangster lover Tom Georgeson. First, she romances Georgeson's dimwitted but deadly henchman Kevin Kline (who won an Academy Award for his performance). Then, to clear the path for her getaway with Kline, Jamie woos Georgeson's starched-shirt attorney, John Cleese -- and it's Cleese whom she genuinely falls in love with. Michael Palin, Cleese's former Monty Python cohort, plays a stuttering mob flunkey who continually messes up his one big assignment: killing a little old lady (it isn't that he has any qualms about knocking off the old dear; it's just that her pet dogs keep getting in the way). A Fish Called Wanda was scripted by star John Cleese. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Rob Reiner's romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally stars Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the title pair. The film opens with the two strangers, both newly graduated from the University of Chicago, share a car trip from Chicago to New York, where they are both going to make their way. During the trip, they discuss aspects of their characters and their lives, eventually deciding it is impossible for men and women to be "just friends." They arrive in New York and go their separate ways. They meet a few years later on an airplane and Harry reveals he is married. They meet again at a bookstore a few years after that where Harry reveals he is now divorced. From that point on, the two form a friendship. Eventually their closeness results in their respective best friends (played by Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby) meeting and falling in love with each other. At a New Year's Eve party Harry and Sally confront the complex tangle of emotions they feel for each other. The soundtrack consists primarily of Harry Connick Jr. crooning standards like "It Had to Be You." ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

He may be called "The Lone Prospector" in The Gold Rush, but the character played by Charlie Chaplin is the same wistful, resourceful Little Tramp that had been entertaining the world and its brother since 1914. A most unlikely participant in the 1898 Yukon gold rush, Charlie finds himself sharing a remote cabin with two much larger and more menacing-looking prospectors: Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain) and Black Larsen (Tom Murray). Big Jim isn't really a bad sort, but Larsen is a murderer and thief. When the food supply runs out, Larsen heads out in the snowy wastes to hunt, leaving Charlie to prepare a delicious Thanksgiving dinner for Big Jim, consisting of roasted shoe. The days pass: in a delirium, Big Jim imagines that Charlie is a huge chicken, and voraciously takes after him with an axe; Charlie saves himself by inadvertently shooting a bear, thereby providing enough food for ten men (Chaplin's inspiration for this episode was the cannibalistic activities of the Donner Party). When the winds subside, Charlie and Big Jim part company. Charlie heads off to seek his fortune in a nearby gold-rush community, while Big Jim lucks upon a "mountain of gold" -- just before he is ambushed and knocked unconscious by Black Larsen. Larsen himself is then killed by an avalanche, leaving Big Jim to wander aimlessly, his memory gone. Meanwhile, Charlie has fallen in love, from afar, with self-reliant saloon girl Georgia (Georgia Hale) who doesn't know that he exists. By a fluke, Charlie and Georgia meet, whereupon Charlie invites the girl to New Year's Eve dinner in the cabin that he is tending for a local prospector. While preparing for dinner, Charlie imagines that Georgia has arrived with her friends; he entertains the girls by jabbing two forks in two rolls, then performing a captivating little "dance" with the pastries. Awakening from his dream, Charlie disconsolately realizes that Georgia has forgotten all about his little party, and isn't going to show up. The next day, Big Jim arrives in town and is shaken out of his amnesia when he spots Charlie. Hoping that the little prospector will help him find his mountain of gold, Big Jim heads back to the mountains with Charlie in tow. The two men nearly come to grief when their cabin, blown by the wind to a mountain precipice, leans precariously over the edge--a peril intensified when Charlie, clinging to the floor, develops a sudden case of hiccups! Luck of luck, the cabin slides safely down the side of the mountain, landing directly upon Big Jim's gold strike. Now fabulously wealthy, Charlie and Big Jim head back to the States on a freighter. Also on board is Georgia, who is unaware that Charlie has struck it rich and thinks that he's a stowaway. She offers to hide him from the authorities, and it is at this point that Charlie and Georgia discover that they're truly in love with one another. The Gold Rush was the longest (it ran nine reels, cut down from its ten-reel preview length) and most elaborately produced of Chaplin's silent comedies (it took him fourteen months to complete). Even so, critics of the era chastised Chaplin for permitting the Little Tramp to win the girl at the end, arguing that the character's "integrity" was damaged by so happy an ending. Evidently, Chaplin took this criticism to heart: in his 1942 reissue of The Gold Rush, for which he wrote a narration and musical score, Chaplin removed the final embrace between the Lone Prospector and Georgia, fading out on a wealthy -- but still unattached -- Charlie strolling about the deck. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Farrelly Brothers set this romantic comedy in their home state of Rhode Island. In 1985, when teen-nerd Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller) challenges a high-schooler who's bullying retarded Warren Jenson (W. Earl Brown), his concern prompts Warren's sister, the dazzling and desirable Mary Jenson (Cameron Diaz) to choose Ted as her senior prom date, a fact Ted's pals find hard to believe. However, on prom night, Ted gets his penis caught in his zipper, so the much-desired date never happens. Living in Providence and waxing nostalgic 13 years later, Ted hires Pat Healy (Matt Dillon) to locate Mary, and the creepy private investigator finds her in Miami, where she lives with her tan-shriveled roommate Magda (Lin Shaye). After Pat develops a stalker-style fixation on the lovely, unattached Mary, he lies to Ted, telling him that she's now an overweight mother confined to a wheelchair. Employing professional eavesdropping equipment, Pat gathers a dossier on Mary's life and future plans, information that forms the basis for more lies when Pat begins dating her. Sure enough, Mary falls for Pat, although her friend Tucker (Lee Evans) is very suspicious of Pat's claim to be a Harvard-educated architect. Meanwhile, Ted learns the truth but continues to encounter offbeat obstacles as he accelerates to Miami in hopes of finding happiness with his true love. Former Modern Lovers singer Jonathan Richman vocalizes a narrative ballad of onscreen commentary in the Cat Ballou (1965) tradition. Most of the cast sings and frolics to Build Me Up, Buttercup by The Foundations during the closing credits. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

Filmed on what MGM considered a B-picture budget and schedule (14 days, which at Universal or Columbia would have been considered extravagant), The Thin Man proved to be "sleeper," spawning a popular film, radio, and television series. Contrary to popular belief, the title does not refer to star William Powell, but to Edward Ellis, playing the mean-spirited inventor who sets the plot in motion. The recently divorced Clyde Wynant (Ellis) discovers that his new girlfriend, Julia Wolf (Natalie Moorhead), has stolen 50,000 dollars and is carrying on with other men. Not long afterward, he disappears. Anxious to locate her father, Wynant' daughter, Dorothy (Maureen O'Sullivan), goes to private detective Nick Charles (William Powell) for help. Having just married the lovely and wealthy Nora (Myrna Loy), Nick has no desire to return to sleuthing, but the thrill-seeking Nora eagerly talks him into taking Dorothy's case. Shortly thereafter, Wynant's lady friend is murdered; so far as police detective John Guild (Nat Pendleton) is concerned, the still-missing Wynant is the guilty party. Nick is unsatisfied with this deduction, and with the help of his wire fox terrier, Asta, he manages to uncover several vital clues -- including a decomposed corpse. At a fancy dinner party, between cocktails and the first course, Nick solves the mystery and exposes a hidden murderer. The story itself, lifted almost verbatim by scenarists Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich from the Dashiell Hammett novel on which The Thin Man is based, hardly matters. The film's strong suit is the witty repartee between Nick and Nora Charles, who manage to behave like saucily illicit lovers throughout the film even though they're married. The chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy would be adroitly exploited by MGM in several subsequent films, including five additional Thin Man mysteries produced between 1936 and 1948. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This whimsical fantasy about a local drunk's 6' 3 1/2" imaginary rabbit pal was a smash hit (and a Pulitzer Prize winner) on Broadway and was then adapted into this likeable farce that's also an allegory about tolerance. James Stewart stars as Elwood P. Dowd, a wealthy tippler whose sunny philosophy and inebriated antics are tolerated by most of the citizenry. That is, until Elwood begins claiming that he sees a "pooka," (a mischievous Irish spirit) which has taken the form of a man-sized bunny named Harvey. Although everyone is certain that Elwood has finally lost his mind, Harvey's presence begins to have magically positive effects on the townsfolk, with the exception of Elwood's own sister Veta (Josephine Hull), who, ironically, can also occasionally see Harvey. A snooty socialite, Veta is determined to marry off her daughter Myrtle (Victoria Horne) to somebody equally respectable, and Elwood's lunacy is interfering. When Veta attempts to have Elwood committed to an insane asylum, however, the result is that she is accidentally admitted instead of her brother. Then the institution's director, Dr. Chumley (Cecil Kellaway) begins seeing Harvey, too. Hull, who reprised her part from the stage production, won an Oscar and Golden Globe. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

"This is the story of the period between two world wars--an interim during which insanity cut loose, liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kicked around somewhat." With this pithy opening title, Charles Chaplin begins his first all-talking feature film, The Great Dictator. During World War I, a Jewish barber (Chaplin) in the army of Tomania saves the life of high-ranking officer Schultz (Reginald Gardiner). While Schultz survives the conflict unscathed, the barber is stricken with amnesia and bundled off to a hospital. Twenty years pass: Tomania has been taken over by dictator Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin again) and his stooges Garbitsch (Henry Daniell) and Herring (Billy Gilbert). Hynkel despises all Jews and regularly wreaks havoc on the Tomanian Jewish ghetto, where feisty Hannah (Paulette Goddard) lives. Meanwhile, the little barber escapes from the hospital and instinctively heads back to his cobweb-laden ghetto barber shop. Unaware of Hynkel's policy towards Jews (in fact, he's unaware of Hynkel), the barber gets into a slapstick confrontation with a gang of Aryan storm troopers. He is rescued by his old friend Schultz, now one of Hynkel's most loyal officers. Thanks to Schultz's protection, the ghetto receives a brief respite from Hynkel's persecution. The barber sets up shop again, developing a warm platonic relationship with the lovely Hannah. But things take a sorry turn when Hynkel, angered that a Jewish banker has refused to finance his impending war with Austerlitz, begins bearing down again on the Ghetto. Near the end of the film, when the dictator is expected to make another one of his hate-filled, war-mongering speeches, the barber steps up to the microphones...and Charles Chaplin drops character and becomes "himself," delivering an impassioned plea for peace, tolerance, and humanity. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide