MEL AS MENTOR Part Two

DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID (1982: Dir. Carl Reiner)

Despite having worked together as writers on Sid Caesar's 1950s variety televison show Your Show of Shows, and later as writer-performers of the famous skit The 2000 Year-Old Man, Carl Reiner never fully embraced the Mel Brooks style of comic parody until he had a few films under his belt as director. Perhaps he came late to the party due to a reluctance to copy his buddy Mel, who was making hits like Blazing Saddles (1974) by doing what they both had done in a short sketch format for Caesar. Reiner instead plowed his own field as an auteur with his autobiographical film Enter Laughing (1967), the profane Jewish mother comedy Where's Poppa? (1970), the George Burns hit Oh God (1977) and Steve Martin's debut classic The Jerk (1979). Having enjoyed a fruitful previous collaboration, Reiner teamed up with Martin again for a follow-up film. In Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid  Steve's deadpan silly-ass persona is seamlessly dropped into a Forties film noir parody where he believably interacts with Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, Ava Gardner et al. via old film clips, ingeniously edited together with new scenes shot in matching black and white. Just as Mel's Young Frankenstein was a tongue-in-cheek love letter to Universal's monster cycle of the Thirties, so this project was Reiner and Martin tipping a daffy hat to Forties detective films like the The Big Sleep (1945). Hilariously absurd, the film was perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, and viewed in hindsight, its failure to connect with audiences seems less an indication of quality and more a sign of the growing cultural divide between a generation raised on noir classics and a younger more impatient demographic obsessed with pacy films full of special effects and technology. Reiner would mine similar territory ten years later with the amusing sex thriller spoof  Fatal Instinct. After an early screening of that movie, Reiner's friend Mel Brooks suggested a far more comically evocative title, one that might have even made it a hit: Frontal Attraction.  DVD REGION 1 & 2