Sub-Cult #8/Danny DeVito Month: Johnny Dangerously (1984)

The Boys!

One of the nice things about writing a book over the course of three and a half years, the way I have with The Weird Accordion to Al, is that it gives you ample time to learn things that can make the book better, if only by a tiny bit. 

Recently I was thinking about the Beastie Boys lyric “Well, everybody rapping like it's a commercial/Actin' like life is a big commercial” from “Pass The Mic” and how it echoes “Twister”, where Al imagined a License To Ill-era Beastie Boys rapping a commercial for the Milton Bradley game Twister. I’m not suggesting that Ad-Rock was responding to Al, directly or otherwise, on a conscious or unconscious level. 

But it is interesting that the Beastie Boys would be rapping about other rappers treating art and life as commercials when Al explicitly addressed that subject in his very first rap number, a pitch-perfect Beastie Boys pastiche from an artist who has turned the concept of American life, and certainly American pop culture and pop music, as a big commercial into one of his most resonant and consistent themes. 

In The Weird Accordion to Al I write derisively and dismissively of Amy Heckerling’s 1984 gangster comedy Johnny Dangerously, as a clunker unworthy of either its modest cult or Al’s wonderful theme song, “This Is the Life.” 

Well, brothers and sisters, I am standing before you, naked, literally and metaphorically, and admitting that I was wrong. Wrong!

While it’s no masterpiece, Johnny Dangerously is a breezy, affectionate and good-natured broad comedy/parody in the Zucker Brothers mold. It’s a terrific vehicle for the young, adorable Michael Keaton, who plays gangster Johnny Kelly/Dangerously with a twinkle in his eye, a dazzling, disarming smile and a light touch. 

Looking back, the things that bugged me about Johnny Dangerously as a Michael Keaton-crazy eight year old seeing this in the theaters, and later as a teenager revisiting it on video, are precisely the sorts of things that should have thrilled me about it. 

Johnny Dangerously goes out of its way, for example, to see just how many swear words it can squeeze into its 90 minute runtime and still get away with a kid-friendly PG-13. It’s so obsessed with over-achieving on a profanity-distribution level that it introduces a character who is constantly sort-of swearing without actually swearing, calling people ice-holes and throwing around the phrase “fargin” as if it is simultaneously, you know, the word fucking and also a silly nonsense word appropriate for children.

Johnny Dangerously shares with far too many 1980s comedies an unfortunate conviction that there’s there’s nothing funnier than casually deployed gay slurs or gay panic.

The prominently billed Danny DeVito, for example, doesn’t show up until the movie is half over as Burr, a corrupt DA and straight-arrow attorney Tommy Kelly’s (Griffin Dunne) boss. Burr is gay, something the screenplay finds both inherently hilarious and what little motivation it needs to then kill him off almost immediately. 

After all, once you’ve hilariously established that a man is sexually attracted to another man what more could you possibly do with him? DeVito is then killed by a rampaging bull in a parody of an iconic Schlitz beer commercial that was probably outrageously dated at the time of the film’s release and has grown nonsensical in the ensuing decades. 

Johnny Dangerously is a genial, good-natured comedy, an amiable goof that strikes some very off notes. DeVito gets the worst of it despite his very limited screen time. DeVito is game, as always, but a movie with lots of clever and amusing, if less than gut-busting gags doesn’t have much to offer him. 

Keaton fares much better though he’s so effortlessly magnetic in his radiant prime that he doesn’t need good material to be captivating, just that killer smile. Johnny Dangerously unfolds in flashback as a story simultaneously mensch-like and mobbed-up protagonist Johnny Kelly/Dangerously tells a wayward youth to illustrate that crime does not pay and that the straight life is the only life. 

As with many would-be cautionary tales, however, it’s easy to walk away instead with the message that crime does, in fact, pay, and pay exceedingly well, with all manner of neat fringe benefits and also that the straight life is for suckers. 

Johnny Dangerously opens with a flurry of knowing gags rooted in the hardscrabble cliches of 1930s gangster melodramas, like when Keaton’s Kelly/Dangerously narrates of his youth, “Times were good in America. There was plenty of everything: jobs, security, laughs. America was in great shape, except for the President, William Howard Taft. Was HE a porker. At 310 lbs. he weighed as much as Teddy Roosevelt and half of William McKinley. Immigrants poured into the country from all over the world looking for a better life for their children. And over 97% of them settled into a two-block area of New York City.”

Johnny is a good boy in a comically tough world who is pushed into a world of crime and lawlessness to pay for a never-ending series of questionable, exorbitantly priced medical treatments for mother Ma Kelly (Maureen Stapleton), a tough matriarch with the mouth of a sailor who couldn’t be prouder of her close-knit but very different sons Johnny and his straight-arrow brother Tommy (Griffin Dunne). The crusading attorney vows to take down a criminal underworld he does not realize is ruled in no small part by his happy go lucky brother. 

When Johnny’s boss Jocko (Peter Boyle) steps down it ignites a simmering conflict between Johnny, a lovable scamp in the wrong racket for the right reasons, and his biggest rival, Johnny Vermin (Joe Piscopo) a gun-toting sociopath whose last name provides a good indication of his moral character, or lack thereof. 

In one of a series of running jokes, Vermin sneers that various family members made the mistake of irritating him—ONCE—the implication being that he murdered, or at least maimed them as a result of the transgression. It’s not funny, exactly, in the same way that the rival mob boss’ almost-profanity isn’t chuckle-inducing but it is amusing and weirdly distinctive and memorable in a way that makes silly little movies like this cult favorites if not quite cult classics. 

Johnny Dangerously grows less satirical as it goes along. It begins with a keen eye for the groaning cliches and conventions of old-school Warner Brothers melodramas about brothers on the wrong side of the law but in its second half seems intent on absent-mindedly chasing the same sophomoric, juvenile audience that flocked to Police Academy, which was co-written by Heckerling’s then-husband Neal Israel, earlier in the year. 

In the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al I depict Johnny Dangerously as unworthy of “This Is the Life.” Re-watching Johnny Dangerously changed my mind. In hindsight, “This Is the Life” is the perfect song to begin the movie because it perfectly captures the movie’s mood at its best: breezy, knowing, light-hearted, goofy, nostalgic and full of gleefully anachronistic touches.

I wanted to re-watch Johnny Dangerously largely because of the rather intense “Weird Al” Yankovic phase I have been going through for the past three and a half years. So you can imagine how shocked I was to discover that for legal reasons, VHS copies of Johnny Dangerously did not contain “This Is the Life.”

Instead Johnny Dangerously videotapes included Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave”, a replacement guaranteed to satisfy no one. 

I feel bad for everybody whose ears were assaulted with the garbage noises (I won’t even call it music) of Cole Porter and his garbage number “Let’s Misbehave” instead of being pleasured by the musical stylings of a young “Weird Al” Yankovic. 

Thank God DVD copies of Johnny Dangerously righted this terrible injustice and restored the movie’s true theme song, opening number and spry musical soul. 

As a Danny DeVito movie, Johnny Dangerously is a stiff but as an amiable gag-fest highlighting the irresistible charms of the young Michael Keaton, however, it’s a delight. 

I had seen Johnny Dangerously, ONCE, before writing it up for Danny DeVito Month. Or possibly twice and that was clearly was not enough to appreciate its modest but substantial charms. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course y’all should #BuyMyBook over at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews