The Busy Body

I was surprised to see that 'William Castle was the director for The Busy Body that Paramount used. Castle is best known for ow budget horror films with special effects and sometimes cheesy ones at that. This cast of name players was something wasn't used to.

I also note that sSd Caesar was the star. As this is a Paramount this film had the look and feel of a Jerry Lewis film. If Lewis had starred and maybe a Frank Tashlin directed The Busy Body might have been a classic.

Top crime boss Robert Ryan puts his gofer Sid Caesar on the syndicate board and tells him to retrieve a blue suit from a recently deceased board member. Instead Caesar has him buried in it. With a million dollar sewn in the lining of said suit.

One of the big problems is that Robert Ryan just doesn't do comedy. His part would have worked better with a Lionel Stander or a Sheldon Leonard in it.

In a large supporting cast of familiar faces standing out is Kay Medford as Sid's gangster widow mom.

Nice film, funny in spots, but could have been better.

This comedy has all the elements of the type of comedies Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis were performing in during the 1960's. An ordinary man gets involved with murder (I forgot to mention Dick Van Dyke). The comedy was tailored around the talents of Ben Blue and Caesar, with the other comics filling time. It's a pleasant comedy, but don't go out of your way.

Looks like I'm the only one here who really enjoys The Busy Body, a movie I've watched many times and love. Sid Caesar is really funny, prissy and nitpicky as an obsessive-compulsive, overly fastidious clothes horse (a parody of a GQ/Esquire reader) who is a deliveryman for the mob (like the boss's lunch). Sid's decision to play it straight, as opposed to a scaredy-cat type like Don Knotts, works. Robert Ryan's great, a tough as nails, quick igniting organized crime boss, a combination of Marine drill sergeant and hood. The interaction between these two makes BB the fun pic it is. I wish there had been more of it. The supporting cast is a true who's who of comedic geniuses, from Bill Dana and Dom DeLuise to Godfrey Cambridge and Marty Engels. An added bonus is a young Arlene Golonka in the prime of her stacked sexiness and sweet, ditzy personality. The Vic Mizzy soundtrack is a plus.

Having spent the best part of the first 15 years of his directorial career at Columbia – mostly under the aegis of prolific but cheapjack producer Sam Katzman – William Castle defected to a smaller studio, Allied Artists, in order to make his mark on film history with the horror comic MACABRE (1958). When he improved his gimmicky formula with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL at the same studio but with a bigger star (Vincent Price), his old employers Columbia invited him back into their stable where he spent another five years making some of his most popular and enduring work like THE TINGLER (1959; which reunited him with Price), HOMICIDAL (1961) and STRAIT-JACKET (1964; with Hollywood legend Joan Crawford). At this point, he made a three-movie detour to Universal (where he had work intermittently before in the late 1940s/early 1950s) which culminated in the black comedy LET'S KILL UNCLE (1966; with Nigel Green), by which time his tried-and-tested fusion of horror, comedy and showmanship had begun to wear thin. This signaled yet another (and, in retrospect, final) move on Castle's part resulting in a somewhat unproductive but eventually rewarding 10-year tenure at Paramount…

Although he had previously dwelt in outright comedy, even during his golden period, with his two resistible Tom Poston vehicles – ZOTZ! (1962) and his fairly disastrous colour remake of THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1963) – what came next was almost as significant a departure as MACABRE had been from his earlier work. Indeed, in THE BUSY BODY, Castle had at his disposal the best cast of his entire career – a sure sign for an iconoclastic producer-director that he had hit the mainstream. Ironically, the film's rare screening one Sunday evening many years ago on local TV proved to be my introduction to the director's work and it would be much later that I caught up with the aforementioned movies which had made his reputation as, to put it bluntly, the poor man's Alfred Hitchcock! Indeed, the film under review had the potential of becoming Castle's own THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (1955; the "Master of Suspense"'s second favourite among his films) given the funereal aspects of the plot…but this being the "anything goes" Swinging Sixties, rather than the delightfully subtle black humour of the latter, it went for the broad and overdone farcical style of Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963; with which it shared leading man Sid Casear, no less!) in its depiction of yet another multi-character chase after buried loot…

This is not to say that the resultant movie is unenjoyable – and my middlebrow rating attests to that – but perhaps one expected something more durable from the likes of tough guys Robert Ryan and Charles McGraw, Anne Baxter and Kay Medford, emerging comedians Richard Pryor (in his film debut), Godfrey Cambridge and Dom DeLuise, veteran comics Ben Blue (also returning from the Kramer opus) and George Jessel, etc. Caesar is the latest addition to the "board" of racketeer Ryan (having a great time lampooning his established image), chosen for his sartorial sense which the boss believes will lend a much-needed touch of class to the organization (including McGraw, whom Ryan berates for looking just like a hoodlum!). However, the protagonist is continuously checked on by mother Medford (perhaps the film's single funniest line has her tell Police Lieutenant Pryor: "What'd you think…that I'm one of those possessive mothers?!") and also becomes involved with two women – shady Baxter and ex-showgirl Arlene Golonka, actually the wife of a Caesar associate whose death during a barbecue and subsequent burial wearing the suit he normally carries a million dollars in for Ryan sets the whole plot in motion. Also on hand are a mortician and his sacked assistant (DeLuise), a beloved cop's funeral (at which Caesar ends up being among the pallbearers), an insurance fraud gone awry that leads to murder (again, Caesar becomes the unwitting patsy for these), Caesar's proverbial "taken for a ride" by Cambridge and partner which features a couple of dummies (one of which creates much consternation when propped on a park bench) and, of course, the multiple unearthing of the grave which invariably contains no body. No prizes for guessing the true villain's identity but, for the most part, the film makes for a pleasant if hefty 102 minutes – especially in the good-looking widescreen print I watched.

With Sid Caesar recently departed and this movie finally available to order from Netflix, I finally got this a few days ago. I watched it with Mom just now and she wasn't too crazy for it. I wasn't either though I was highly amused by Caesar much of the time I was watching whenever he had scenes with Dom DeLuise, Ben Blue, or Richard Pryor whose movie debut this was. His highlights, however, was when he took a dummy (don't ask) to a bus bench where he spoke Russian gibberish to a woman from there and when he encountered Arlene Golonka when she was in her stripper costume and he reacts to her moves. Director William Castle, who usually made gimmicky horror movies, doesn't seem to have much of a comedy flair but the players do the best with what's given them. So on that note, The Busy Body is worth a look. P.S. It was a nice surprise to see the Chicago landmarks since it was made at the time my parents were living there and when I was the first-born of the family. And to find out Ms. Golonka was also born there.