In 1979's The In-Laws Alan Arkin and Peter Falk Make for One of the All-Time Great Comedy Teams
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.
A very long time ago, when I still had a job and hope for the future, I created an unpopular column for my old bosses at The A.V. Club called Better Late Than Never. The idea was for writers who had somehow gone their entire lives without experiencing a seminal piece of pop culture to finally watch a classic movie or listen to a classic album or red an important book and then give their thoughts on it. The hope was that whoever was writing the Better Late Than Never piece might have a unique or revelatory take on a classic piece of pop culture that might allow us to see it in a different, hopefully revelatory light.
That was the idea at least. Unfortunately my idea was fatally flawed a conceptual level. I’d created a feature where pretty much all of the responses would be frustrating and disappointing.
For example, if a writer finally got around to watching Casablanca for the first time at thirty-seven and they praised it extensively the default response would be, “No shit! There’s a reason classic movies are held in high regard: they’re fucking classics that have stood the test of time. What on earth can we get out of an article asserting that a movie that everyone thinks is great is, in fact, great?”
If the writer were to watch Casablanca for the first time as an adult and they did not like it in the least and wrote an enthusiastic pan that wouldn’t just disappoint readers: it would make them legitimately angry. They’d ask who the fuck the writer was to be disparaging an all-time classic like Casablanca when they hadn’t seen even seen it until recently?
There would probably be a fair number of commenters/readers who were also underwhelmed by Casablanca and were happy that someone else was articulating what they had always felt but felt self-conscious about stating publicly out of fear of looking like a philistine. I, for one, would have found that take disappointing and frustrating even if it was coming from a commenter rather than a writer.
#Iconicduo
If the writer’s response to Casablanca was a muted, mixed, “It was fine or whatever but I can’t see why people are so crazy about it” that would naturally invite comments of the, “Why on earth did you think your non-response to something universally heralded as great was noteworthy or newsworthy enough to merit a whole article?”
Yes, Better Late Than Never was the one idea I had that ended up not working out.
This afternoon I saw a movie that definitely would have qualified for Better Late than Never: the 1979 classic The In-Laws.
Before today I had never seen The In-Laws. I have no idea why. I love Alan Arkin. I love Peter Falk. I love The In-Laws screenwriter Andrew Bergman, who also wrote and directed Honeymoon in Vegas. I’d heard nothing but good things about it.
Then again the people who raved about it to me in person were overwhelmingly middle-aged dads who frequented the video stores where I worked in high school and college.
I suppose I was reluctant to see The In-Laws because I saw it as a middle-aged dad movie. Now that I am a middle aged dad I can scream out loud to the world, “The In-Laws is great! Alan Arkin and Peter Falk are super-funny in it! They have fantastic chemistry! The script is a winner! Arthur Hiller’s direction is adequate!”
I hope you guys are sitting down because I thought a movie that everyone thinks is a laugh riot is, in fact, a laugh riot.
In a role that fits him every bit as perfectly as Lieutenant Columbo, Peter Falk plays Vince Ricardo, a wild man with a genius for saying impossibly crazy things as if they were the sanest, most reasonable sentiments in the world.
He’s a forceful lunatic who sounds unnervingly confident spouting even the craziest lies.
When Vince Ricardo meets Dr. Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin), the father of Barbara (Penny Peyser), the woman who will be marrying his son Tommy (Michael Lembeck) for the first time he tries to wow him and his wife with stories of his adventures across the globe.
Holding court, Falk’s charismatic nut talks about encountering tsetse flies so massive that they would pick up Central American children and carry them to their inevitable doom.
Arkin doesn’t need to say a goddamn word to get some of the biggest laughs not just in the movie but in cinematic comedy history as well. As an eminently sane man of reason, logic and rationality, the responsible dentist looks like it’s taking everything in him to refrain from strangling Vince with all his force while screaming at him to stop telling the most egregious whoppers in the history of the universe.
The scene is full of wonderful details, like Vince referring to the killer tsetse as “The Flamenco Dancers of Death” and explaining that the baby-killing flies are protected by environmental laws because of the “provisions of the Guacamole Act of 1917.” In Vince’s wildly unreliable telling at least a jungle that is full of death and disease and killer animals is also full of a surprising amount of red tape.
Arkin was one of the all-time great character actors but he was an even better reactor. He was a peerless straight man who could get more out of a look, or an inflection, or some inspired bit of physical business than most funnymen and women can get out of an entire script full of jokes.
Because The In-Laws is a smart movie for smart people they wisely resist the urge to make Arkin’s character gullible or a schmuck. He knows right off the bat that there is something deeply wrong with the father of the man who is marrying his daughter, to the point that he wants to call off the wedding.
The dentist’s wife talks him out of cancelling the wedding at the last minute because he thinks the groom’s dad is nuttier than a squirrel’s diet and crazier than a shithouse rat.
Sheldon is immediately sucked into Vince’s weird world. Vince tells him, “I want you to break into my safe” as if that is an exceedingly reasonable favor to ask of someone they just met.
Soon these very different men, joined by circumstance and their children’s marriage find themselves dodging bullets and certain death.
As things get more and more desperate a reversal occurs. The dentist is a very sane, reasonable man but he’s so understandably freaked out by the bizarre, deadly, seemingly inexplicable things that are happening to him that he sounds crazy.
The In-Laws is all about comic escalation. Things start off pretty nutty and get loopier and loopier until Sheldon, who has more or less given himself over to the insanity that surrounds him, is confronted by a General Garcia (a scene-stealing Robert Libertini), a Central American dictator who communicates through primitive hand puppetry, like a Hispanic Señor Wences, but with blood on his hands and sinister plans on his mind.
Vince treats the daffy dictator with utterly unearned respect, saving special praise for his extensive collection of saucy black velvet paintings, at least one of which is of the General with a naked prostitute that he wants to be on his country’s currency and flag.
There’s a reason people love The In-Laws and grudgingly tolerate a remake that couldn’t hope to compare to the original despite the inspired casting of Albert Brooks in the Arkin role.
So if you want to celebrate the life and career of a true original I thoroughly, if predictably, suggest watching, or rewatching The In-Laws and then moving on to the many other wonderful films Arkin made over the course of his incredible career.
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