1989's Who's Harry Crumb? Is Sadly Indicative of the Kind of Rancid Garbage John Candy Wasted His Extraordinary Talent On

Honestly, I’m. little surprised those suction cups are able to sustain Candy’s weight, as he was a heavy gentleman

1989’s Who’s Harry Crumb? is a painful illustration of just how egregiously John Candy’s extraordinary talent and charisma was wasted on films unworthy of him. The inept light comedy subscribes to the “Fat man fall down, go boom” school of comedy. Candy spends much of the film falling down in a series of graceless slapstick scenarios: he puts in a more horizontal performance than most porn stars. 

I came to know and love Candy though idiotic vehicles like this. It wasn’t until I discovered SCTV later on that I realized what an extraordinary talent Candy was. SCTV empowered Candy to work at the very apex of his abilities, playing a dazzlingly eclectic array of characters, many wildly different from the portly, dim-witted bumblers Candy played in his perpetually under-achieving solo cinematic vehicles. 

The quintessential underachieving Candy vehicle, Who’s Harry Crumb? casts Executive Producer Candy as the title character, a third-generation detective whose father and grandfather were both world-class shamuses. Alas, Candy’s dunce of a detective does not appear to have inherited the family’s investigative gene. In sharp contrast to his distinguished relatives, he’s a total and complete idiot, a bumbling boob as unnecessarily, undeservedly confident, even cocky, as he is incompetent. 

Crumb’s approach to undercover work is nearly identical to that of Master of Disguise’s Pistachio Disguisey. In both cases, these undercover specialists make the curious, even counter-intuitive choice to wear the fakest, most obvious and grotesquely over-the-top disguise possible, the kind absolutely guaranteed to attract attention, all of the unwanted variety, as a means of moving stealthily through the world undetected. These undercover idiots labor under the delusion that they must make an obnoxious spectacle of themselves in order to convincingly portray other people.

In Who’s Harry Crumb, Eliot Draisen, a sniveling schemer played by Jeffrey Jones at his Jeffrey Jonesiest hires Crumb to investigative the kidnapping of Jennifer Downing (Renée Coleman), a model and the daughter of wealthy fishing enthusiast P.J Downing (Barry Corbin) and stepdaughter of Helen Downing (Annie Potts), a gold-digger, femme fatale and nymphomaniac who plotted the kidnapping with Eliot and her dim-witted tennis pro lover Vince Barnes (Tim Thomerson). 

Yes, this is an original oil paining.

Jones’ lust-crazed villain hires the title character because he knows he’s an idiot but the detective proves a bit of an idiot-savant, with a heavy emphasis on the idiot part. Depending on the needs of the scene, Crumb can be shockingly smart and incisive, not to mention light on his feet and capable of flips and remarkable feats of agility, or so stupid and clumsy it’s a miracle that he’s made it to middle-age without accidentally killing himself. 

The clumsy slapstick set-pieces here tend to follow a familiar template, or rather a pair of familiar templates. In scene after scene, Harry will enter a room overflowing with the fabled confidence of a mediocre white man (although in this case Harry is decidedly sub-mediocre when he’s not inexplicably a genius), absent-mindedly fiddle with some contraption and doohickey, nearly kill or maim himself or others due to his clumsiness, attempt to hide the damage that he’s caused to himself or property to others, then slink off to the next scene so that this laugh-less and distractingly predictable scenario can play itself out again and again.

Early in the film, for example, Eliot Draisen mentions that a pterodactyl egg in his office is ninety million years old, and one of only two in the world, and consequently worth a small fortune. From the moment the egg is introduced an invisible countdown begins as to when Harry Crumb’s bumbling will result in the comical destruction of this invaluable artifact. 

Like Chekhov’s Gun, this priceless artifact will have to pay off comically sooner or later; sure enough Harry destroys it in due time, along with so much else that I couldn’t help but wonder where he was going to come up with the money to pay back the millions of dollars worth of things he demolishes through incompetence over the course of the film. 

In the comedy’s second other kind of scene, Harry decides to go undercover in an outrageous outfit , such as a jockey’s uniform, and then proceeds to imperil his own life, and the lives of everyone around him through his dangerous bumbling.

In his most heinous and problematic disguise, Candy slathers on brown face make-up and wears a turban to masquerade as an inept Indian air conditioner repairman with an accent of  Apu-like thickness and cartoonishness. In case the make-up, turban and accent aren’t enough of a giveaway, this offensive caricature works for a company called Bombay Express and is introduced with sitar music. 

Not a good look.

That might seem egregiously racist as well as desperately and painfully unfunny, even before Candy’s fellow SCTV alum Joe Flaherty (whose brother Paul directed) pops up in a particularly undignified cameo as a sports-loving security guard to call the fake immigrant in his midst first “Tonto” and then “Sabu.”

But it’s important to remember that this was made and released in the 1980s, before people realized that racism was bad and something to be avoided. Back then people labored under the delusion that racism, and racist stereotypes, were hilarious, and fun, and something to be indulged as enthusiastically and indiscriminately as possible. 

Then again, these days a lot of people still people think racism, and racist stereotypes, are hilarious, and fun, and something to be indulged in as enthusiastically and indiscriminately as possible, but at least there’s a little more self-awareness. Heck, Lorne Michaels hasn’t put a white actor in blackface in probably months, even years, and he LOVES that shit, to the point where he had a non-black dude play our first black president and people were somehow fine with it because god knows he certainly couldn’t have a black man to play a role like that. Obviously it would be different if there were black sketch performers who could play different characters and impersonate real people but the fact that Michaels had Billy Crystal, Jimmy Fallon and Fred Armisen play Sammy Davis Jr., Chris Rock and Barack Obama respectively indicates otherwise. 

I saw Who’s Harry Crumb? during its theatrical run because I liked Candy despite the abysmal nature of his solo vehicles but also because I had a huge crush on Annie Potts and found the promise of her playing an over-sexed cartoon femme fatale irresistible. That is the one element of the movie that not only delivers but over-delivers. Potts, best known as the quirky receptionist in Ghostbusters and one of the Designing Women of Designing Women is incredibly sexy in a series of tight outfits and sexy lingerie. 

Along with its totally 80s casual racism the film adds the extra spice of sexism as well. Even our child-like, asexual bungler of a hero refers to the would-be black widow behind the kidnapping as a slut. The scheming younger wife is a misogynistic stereotype, all greed and lust and cynical calculation and a film pitched squarely at ten year old boys who love Candy’s goofball shenanigans adds an utterly unnecessary and misplaced element of sexual violence by having the man holding Jennifer, the kidnapped girl, hostage threaten her in explicitly sexual ways. 

Jones has two modes here. When he’s around Potts’ sexpot he’s pure lust, a sentient hard-on, all uncontrollable sexual hunger. And when he’s in the presence of our hapless hero he’s all barely controlled rage; Harry’s mere existence renders him apoplectic. He seems perpetually on the brink of a rage and Harry Crumb-induced heart attack. 

Shawnee Smith plays the kidnapped girl’s earthier sister, who joins Harry in the investigation, functioning as his more sensible sidekick and foil. She’s Penny to his Inspector Gadget, his sidekick and confidante. 

Who’s Harry Crumb? belongs to the action-comedy sub-genre in which detectives manage to crack the big case and save the day despite behaving like total incompetents the entire film. It’s 85 minutes of pure nonsense, a film with no redeeming value whatsoever. Who’s Harry Crumb? is every bit as insultingly stupid as I remembered, a tacky and thoroughly unfunny artifact of the George H.W Bush era. 

Yet Who’s Harry Crumb? was also everything I wanted it to be. There’s something about really stupid comedies, movies violently divorced from anything resembling real life, that I find oddly soothing and weirdly reassuring, particularly when they hit me in the nostalgia sweet spot the way this particular turkey does. 

These wonderfully idiotic exercises in pure escapism illustrate that there is more than just tragedy and death and disease in this sick, sad, decaying world. Our curious universe contains more than just pandemics and crises and death and pain; it also contains idiotic romps where John Candy wears a bunch of stupid outfits and falls down a lot. And sometimes that reminder of life’s abundant idiocy is just what you need to help you get through another long, impossibly demanding day. 

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