... and that is really no surprise since this film was written and directed by Norman Lear, architect of so many hit TV shows in the 1970s.
Bob Newhart plays Merwin Wren, a tobacco executive who pitches the idea of giving 25 million dollars to any town that gives up tobacco for one month. He figures this will redeem the image of the tobacco industry, and what town could get every smoker to give up smoking for a month?
Enter tiny town of four thousand, Eagle Rock, Iowa. It lost a major employer and people are leaving town. The military has said that Eagle Rock is at the top of the list to receive a new missile manufacturing plant, but they have to spruce up the town's infrastructure first. But how, with a diminishing tax base? So, encouraged by the town's preacher, Clayton Brooks, the town takes the pledge.
Wren's job is on the line if Eagle Rock succeeds, so he goes to the town to try and get just one smoker's foot to slip. Meanwhile, tobacco withdrawal hits the entire town hard with comic results. If you've ever watched a loved one go through such withdrawal, this will look familiar to you. The first half of the film is about the comic attempt to stop smoking. The second half is about how easy it is for greed to set in once the town becomes famous and is making just about as much money from tourism as it hopes to make from the tobacco company if it succeeds.
The film is classic Lear as he lampoons just about everything - men of the cloth, men of medicine - they were all men back then, marriage, big business, right ring groups that see Communism everywhere but really just want to be authoritarians themselves, and news anchors back when they were actually respectable and weren't just talking heads.
The billing of the cast is really odd in retrospect. As expected, Dick Van Dyke is top billed. But second billed is...Pippa Scott? She doesn't even have that big a role in the film! And Bob Newhart, who was really great at playing the slimy little weasel here is bottom billed!
I'd highly recommend it. It is certainly one of Dick Van Dyke's better film roles and you get to see Norman Lear at work just as he was becoming famous.
