This Looks Terrible! Once Upon a Crime (1992)

I love Schitt’s Creek so much it’s got me straight trippin, boo!

Like everyone, I am completely obsessed with Schitt’s Creek. My wife and I have been re-watching the series throughout the interminable, endless quarantine. It’s a goddamn delight as well as a welcome reminder that the world contains light and joy and warmth and not just death and doom. 

I was thinking absent-mindedly recently about how wonderful Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara are on the show, and what a goddamn shame it is that two of the most brilliant comic performers of the past half century weren’t afforded more opportunities to operate at the very apex of their extraordinary talents over the course of their careers. 

Then I actually looked at Catherine O’Hara’s IMDB entry and realized how egregiously wrong I had been in that assessment, because holly shit, the Canadian comedy icon most assuredly has a resume commensurate with her genius, one overflowing with comedy classics, smash hits and movies and television shows that have influenced generations upon generations of funny people. 

SCTV! Rock & Rule! Fucking After Hours! Beetlejuice! Dick Tracy! The terrible but commercially successful Home Alone and Home Alone 2! The Nightmare Before Christmas! Waiting for Guffman! Best in Show! A Mighty Wind! Schitt’s Creek! In that respect Schitt’s Creek isn’t a matter of a brilliant but terminally wasted and under-utilized actress finally getting her due so much as it’s the Maraschino cherry atop the delicious triple scoop hot fudge sundae that is O’Hara’s storied career. 

The same is true of Levy as well except that he’s done FAR more work that’s not just bad but egregiously awful, projects so dire and misguided that there was no way they could possibly be good. Levy, is after all, a comedy legend who has lent his presence not just to the American Pie , American Pie 2, American Wedding and American Reunion but also the American Pie’s many direct-to-video spin-offs, including American Pie Presents: The Book of Love, American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, American Pie Presents: Band Camp and American Pie Presents: Beta House, which I’m guessing is about a frat full of cucks who watch while members of a more popular fraternity have sex with their girlfriends, judging by its name. 

So proud!

What? Are you sure I’m in this one too? I’m not on the poster at least, right?

Before there was Schitt’s Creek Eugene Levy appeared in some seriously schitty movies in exchange for some seriously big money.

I like how unpleasantly surprised Eugene Levy seems to be about being in all of these movies

Levy is the man blessed and cursed with delivering the line, “You got me straight tripping, boo!” In Bringing Down the House. If I might give Levy the faintest praise in the history of faint praise, he was easily the best part of that racist abomination. To give him even fainter praise, his career is more impressive than his extensive participation in direct-to-video teen sex comedies would suggest. 

It’s easy to think that Levy got lucratively typecast as affable, beetle-browed, bespectacled Poindexters thanks to the extraordinary success of American Pie and milked it for all its worth but there’s SO much more to Levy’s career than playing the white guy in Madea’s Witness Protection.

In addition to SCTV, Levy’s career contains such highlights and hits as Heavy Metal, Vacation, Splash, Waiting for Guffman, American Pie, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, Goon, Finding Dory and now Schitt’s Creek. 

That said, Levy has been in a LOT of garbage. For all his undeniable talent, if Levy is in a movie you assume it’s probably going to suck, just as bad John Candy vehicles are undeniably the rule rather than the exception despite Candy also appearing in a string of hits such as The Blues Brothers, Stripes, Heavy Metal, Vacation, Splash, Little Shop of Horrors, Spaceballs, Planes, Trains & Automobiles,Uncle Buck, Home Alone and Cool Runnings. You know your bad movies are terrible when you appear in hit after hit and people still remember you as making primarily as a dude who made bad movies that flopped. 

Are James Belushi and Cybill Shepherd in a classic Fred Astaire musical? Because those are some FUNNY faces!

Considering the less than glowing reputation of Candy and Levy movies, it seems safe to assume that if these two titans of the Canadian comedy world made a mostly forgotten movie together in the early nineties that received the dreaded “Zero” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning not a single notable critic gave it a positive review, then it’s probably inconceivably awful, a real insult to the public’s intelligence. 

Yet I am pleased to report that Levy’s little-loved 1992 directorial debut, Once Upon a Crime, from Italian super-producer Dino De Laurentis of Conan the Barbarian, Dune and the 1976 version of King Kong fame and screenwriter Nancy Meyers (who co-wrote with her ex-husband Charlie and Steve Kluger) not only brought me to the very brink of modest laughter throughout, it pushed me past it semi-regularly. 

A remake of 1960 Italian comedy Crimen that had previously been remade by its original director in 1971, Once Upon a Crime is a comic whodunnit that follows a series of desperate and conniving characters involved with the corpse of a wealthy old lady and a lost dachshund. 

Name a more iconic duo!

But Once Upon a Crime is also a “Whocares?” since the plot matters only as a springboard for some moderately clever gags and enjoyably goofy performances. The top billed John Candy leads an ensemble cast as Augie Morosco, a degenerate gambling addict improbably married to Elena (Ornella Muti), a raving beauty as gorgeous as she is wealthy. 

Augie begins the film in a state of unearned superiority, having ostensibly overcome his life-destroying vice through the grace of his Higher Power and Gambling Anonymous. But it all it takes is an encounter with fellow gambling addict Neil Schwary (James Belushi) to send him spiraling back into his old ways. 

Like all good people, I am on record as finding James Belushi repellent as a performer and a human being. But I will wearily concede that I thoroughly enjoyed his performance because he plays a James Belushi-like misogynist and all-around creep who treats his gorgeous wife Marilyn (Cybill Shepard) with richly unmerited condescension early on and spends the rest of the film receiving his comeuppance, most notably in the form of his long-suffering wife, who quickly gains the upper hand in their relationship, smacking her sniveling and apologetic husband in the face repeatedly in ways I found more satisfying than is probably appropriate. 

It’s James Belushi as you’ve never seen him before: looking nothing like James Belushi!

Then there’s Julian Peters (Richard Lewis), an actor with unmistakably Richard Lewis-like vibe who strikes up a partnership of convenience with daffy Phoebe (Sean Young) when they both come across a lost dachshund with a five thousand dollar reward. I suspect that the dog was attracted to Young because he sensed that she was the real Catwoman, no matter what that Tim Burton monster might insist.

What I like most about Richard Lewis these days is that he’s a Woody Allen-like figure with an unmistakably Woody Allen-like persona whose harmless comic neuroses you can enjoy, up to a point, without having to think about whether or not he has molested children. Also, he looks like Lenny Bruce with a mullet.  

After squandering his money at the casino, Neil, of the Newark Schwarys, comes across a suitcase he’s hoping will be full of money but instead contains the chopped-up remains of the wealthy old woman who lost her dog. 

This attracts the attention of Inspector Bonnard (Giancarlo Giannini), who intuits that the wealthy old woman’s murder is connected to the lost dog and the scheming Americans. 

Giannini does not appear until Once Upon a Crime until halfway through. His presence changes the tone and genre of the film. A wild yet mild comic rumpus about disreputable characters chasing money and trying to avoid prison gives way to a light comic mystery about a murder and the sketchy opportunists in suspicion. 

Once Upon a Crime is not hilarious but it did provide me with a steady stream of mild chuckles. Giannini is wonderfully deadpan as the detective tasked with solving the crime at the film’s center.

Levy has a wonderful uncredited cameo as a smug cashier at the casino with a child molester mustache the same thickness and richness as his eyebrows. When Belushi’s New Jersey gambling fiend attempts to buy a modest amount of chips from Levy’s casino employee he sneers, “I’ll have to get the SMALLER markers. They use them in the CHILDREN’S casino.” It’s funny because of the sheer amount of condescension and contempt Levy squeezes into just a few words, quintessential ugly American Neil’s apoplectic response and the idea of a children’s casino where kids can gamble just like their parents, but for less money. 

Once Upon a Time is not as clever or funny as Rat Race but it shares with that cult film a tone of genial amiability and some genuinely inspired gags. 

Levy’s maligned mystery-comedy is what I had hoped Who’s Harry Crumb? would be, a likable, intermittently funny romp that’s not misogynistic or racist or inexplicably, unnecessarily hateful. It certainly helps that I went into it with the lowest of expectations. 

Will all of the Candy vehicles I write about for John Candy Month be as pleasantly surprising as Once Upon a Crime? Probably not, but I prefer to live in a state of delusional optimism no matter how often, or how viciously, I end up being disappointed. 

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