Another Nice Mess

..I just got the title wrong. Since it was based on Laurel & Hardy, I thought it was called "Another Fine Mess". For years, I've been trying to track this film down. Now I'm not alone in my memory of this movie. I was a teenager when it came out.

NIXON: "Tit for a tat."

AGNEW: "...And a sh*t to that."

Thanks, IMDB!

I'm amazed that this film finally showed up on IMDB. For year's I've called it the most obscure movie ever made, since not a single reference source - Maltin, Variety, Screen World - has ever listed it, despite the presence of familiar names like Smothers, Little and Einstein in the credits. Made during the brief spurt of anti-Nixon movies in the early 70s, it's a one-joke movie, and not a very good one. The premise is that Nixon and Agnew have the vocal patterns and mannerisms of Laurel and Hardy. The result is an all-too familiar collection of imitation L & H gags with hardly anything that could pass as political satire...

I first became aware of this movie back in 1971 when Rich Little plugged it on Dick Cavett's show. A clip showed 3 minutes worth of Nixon & Agnew doing Laurel & Hardy's dance steps from "Way Out West." Not only that, Rich Little as Nixon and Herb Voland as Agnew were dead-ringers. The uncanny part is the President and Vice-President spoke and even moved like Stan & Ollie. Sounds like a riot right? Well...if playing golf with Hitler, and getting duped into eating Alice B. Toklas brownies where they go into a "Blotto" laughing fit and hallucinate seeing white robed Ku Kluk Klan members playing hardball in slow motion, doesn't discount you, then this may be your movie of all time for political incorrectness. You won't find it in the credits but Steve Martin makes his feature film debut as a long haired hippie. Steve was writing for the Smothers Brothers back them. In short, the L&H stuff is fun. The padding, i.e. Secret Service (Bob Einsein) is painful. They'll never release this, but I hope they do.

Ever have the feeling that you are the only one in the world who saw something? And everywhere you look to verify what you saw, there's nothing? So it was for years with "Another Nice Mess". If I didn't already have plenty of other reasons to doubt my own sanity, trying to find anything on this little film would have been a BIG reason. Rich Little and Herb Voland (probably best remebered today as General Clayton in the early run of M*A*S*H) do Nixon and Agnew as Laurel and Hardy. Need we say a lot more? Probably not. But give it a look if you ever run across it. This one truly belongs in the "What were they thinking" Hall of Fame.

At 14 I was a big fan of Rich Little (and Nixon, I'm ashamed to say), and badgered my mom in to taking me to see this at the Americana 5 in Panorama City, CA. If she knew something was up when we turned out to be nearly alone in the theater, she never let on. I'm sure she regretted it, but I remember enjoying it a lot. I don't remember a lot about the film, but I do recall that several times during the film they'd flash to Rich Little doing Nixon as Nixon (with a very good make-up job) watching the film in a screening room, and making comments. I don't know what made me think of this film today, but I'm happy to see that others remember this film, fondly or not...