Skidoo [Blu-ray]

Especially when it involves such a roster of A-List talent from the sixties and the swan song of one of the all time greats. Jackie GleasonCarol Channing and the incomparable Groucho Marx all signed aboard Otto Premingers' bizaare take on the evolving youth movement and attempted to shake it up in a cocktail mixer of hippy ho hums and mobster mayhem that turns into one of the biggest train wrecks of 20th Century Cinema. It's worth a look just knowing you won't be able to turn away.

A movie I saw in a theater during a midnight movie screening a long time ago. I spent years trying to find it. I eventually got a poorly dubbed VHS copy, but was wonderfully surprised to see this finally make DVD. Not a film for everybody. Odd, to say the least. And Groucho Marx's last film appearance. The ending credits are sung......how can you go wrong?

I only got to see half of this movie one night on TCM. I had always wanted to see it because I'm an Otto Preminger fan and it's rarely ever shown (but now is being released on DVD). It's been treated like it's the worst movie ever made by many critics, who savaged it when it came out in 1968. The meeting of hippies and Otto Preminger was far too much for the critics to take back in those days, I guess.Actually having seen the 2nd half of the film made me realise that the film, while not perfect, is actually pretty creative and crazy. It's hard to recount the plot, as it's pretty convoluted and kind of inconsequential considering the craziness that's going on in the film. Some of the schtick in the film feels forced, but overall, I found the 2nd half of the film really funny and charming. Gleason's ride on a baloon is a wonderful highlight, and the whole cast is pretty game given the circumstances. It was also rather brave of Preminger to try something as experimental as this at this point in his career. It doesn't always work, but the film has enough positives to make it worth seeing, even for those who don't care for Preminger.And yes, the final credits are hysterical. Yes, they are sung by Harry Nilsson, and it is one of the best credit sequences in all of cinema.Otto Preminger's Skiddo can finally be seen, and it deserves to be.

PERFEITO

SKIDOO is an amazing movie. Where else are you going to find JACKIE GLEASON tripping out on acid or the immortal GROUCHO MARX playing GOD. This movie has got it all,action,comedy,gangsters,hippies,drugs and many Hollywood icons. Anyone remember Carol Channing,well shes here too. Always heard about this movie now im glad i own it.

Otto Preminger was considered a great craftsman but not an important director to be included in the same list with Billy Wilder, John Ford, and Howard Hawks despite the fact that he directed some movies that are undeniable classics including Laura (1944); The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955); Anatomy of a murder (1959) and Advise and Consent (1962). He was a very successful and consistent director for most of his career but his winning streak ended for good in the mid 1960's and he made movies that were universally panned box office flops for the last 15 years of his career.Some--Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965); Rosebud (1975) and The Human Factor (1979) have turned out to be much better films than critics claimed at the time. Skidoo (1968) is the most notorious film from this period and it remains a movie that is very difficult to defend.Skidoo was Otto Preminger's attempt to prove he wasn't a stuffy old man by making a counter-culture film of sorts. The plot has to do with retired gangster Tough Tony (Jackie Gleason) being pressured by mafia boss God (Groucho Marx) into assassinating a mobster turned snitch (Mickey Rooney) who is being kept in prison isolation. Tough Tony gets smuggled into prison as a convict and will be smuggled out within 24 hours of completing the hit. Meanwhile Jackie Gleason's daughter and wife have become involved with a bunch of free love, body painting, pot smoking hippies.The movie can be viewed as a comedic representation of the culture clash between the establishment and the youth movement that was going on in the streets across America--but in typical Otto Preminger fashion neither side is depicted in a favorable light. The established order is represented by gangsters and killers--at one point a mobster played by Frankie Avalon shows off a large flow chart demonstrating how the mob provides the structure that keeps America functioning. On the other side the hippies are depicted as being lazy, prone to endlessly spouting a lot of empty jargon and wanting to throw out the old without giving any thought to what they want to replace it with.It's a supremely cynical view of what was going on in America circa 1968, shot as an anarchic anything goes comedy that is very rarely funny. But Skidoo has some moments that are so bizarre they might be worth sitting through the movie for. When you think Jackie Gleason's accidental acid trip it sounds weird but it turns out to be even more bizarre than it sounds. My favorite moment by far happens after everyone in the jail is slipped LSD in the food--two tower guards see the garbage cans in the courtyard come to life and perform a musical number by Nilsson. It's a sublimely weird sequence and if more of Skidoo went out on that kind of insane limb it would be a much happier experience to sit through.Otto Preminger should be commended for trying to do something different but he wasn't the right man for this material--it's a farce directed by a man with no feel for comedy, a movie depicting anarchy by a director who was too much of a control freak to allow any genuine disorder into his film. The man who penned Skidoo also wrote the equally strange Brewster McCloud which was a much better movie because Robert Altman was the perfect director for the material. Robert Altman was the polar opposite of Otto Preminger--a pot smoking, laid-back almost hippy who liked loose sets and embraced a style where the director didn't have complete control over everything that happened on-screen. Perfectionist Otto Preminger for all his technical mastery could never have made M*A*S*H*--it required a different set of skills than Preminger brought to his movies and it also required youth, which is something that can't be faked no matter how talented the director.Otto Preminger was not the right director to make Skidoo which is not funny and feels like the work of an old man trying to capture something that he's not capable of understanding--but it's still probably worth sitting through once for its stranger moments--where else can you see the floating disembodied head of Groucho Marx spinning around during an acid trip? Only in Skidoo.

Silly comedy with the big names of its day, it pokes fun at the 60's counterculture, it is more "innocent" than today's movies.

great movie