"A Fine Madness", however, we can offer no rational explanation for.......it was as repulsively noxious in 1966 as it is now. The passage of 51 years has only worsened it......
The primary reason for its existence: to serve as a vehicle for the world's then most in-demand movie star, Sean Connery. Connery, eager to display his non-Bond acting chops, slipped this one in between "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice", shooting the film on New York City streets with a teeming cast of veteran distinguished actors.
This movie desperately depended on Connery's undeniable charisma and sex appeal to candy-coat his character Samson Shillitoe, a raging, hot tempered, anti-social, anti-establishment poet in the throes of writer's block. In other words, only a Sean Connery could make this jerk palatable to audiences.....
We can't remember a more astoundingly hateful character in a 1960's studio film than Connery's Shillitoe........a cowardly sucker-punching bully, a guiltless philanderer, and, to the movie's everlasting shame and embarrassment, a physical abuser of his loyal, long suffering waitress wife. (Joanne Woodward plays this role as a non-stop, screeching nag, which apparently justifies Connery's throwing punches at her, terrorizing her until she tumbles down the stairs of their apartment building......unlike Jackie Gleason's "To the moon, Alice!", Connery's not bluffing...)
But the movie invites us to celebrate Shillitoe's rampage through modern society because.........well, because he's Sean Connery, damn it.....and we ought to forgive him anything.... because he looks so cool doing it (The key to this movie's attitude is better displayed, not in the film itself, but in "Mondo Connery", the unintentionally hilarious 6 minute Warner Brothers promotional featurette.....in which a worshiping, subservient narrator fawns over Connery, describing the actor as practically a Demi-God who has briefly graced New York with his divine presence.....)
Director Irvin Kershner, who 17 years later would direct Connery's rogue Bond "Never Say Never Again", evidently tried for the freewheeling amorality of European films, the ones where you're supposed to chuckle at the sight of lead actors carrying on like assholes.........but the film's shot in ultra-bright primary Technicolor......it looks like a Jerry Lewis comedy that's been hijacked by one of the minor characters, the boorish, obnoxious so-called 'artiste' who's just begging to be punched....
As Connery cuts a swath through New York's psychiatric community (recruited by Woodward for 200 bucks to cure his writer's block) truly bizarre sequences tumble one after the other
....including the sight of Connery manhandling diminutive, helium-voiced John Fiedler, whose high pitched squeal every kid would recognize from Disney cartoons.......that's right, ladies and gentlemen, this is the only movie where you'll get to see James Bond pushing around Piglet.
The BQ's Favorite Woeful Moments of this film: Connery snarling "You tuberculin-tested hags" to a group of outraged matrons he's been paid to read his poems to......a creepy mad shrink (Clive Revill), whose every appearance has a Theramin woo-wooing in the background, performing a double lobotomy on Connery in hopes of turning him into a normal docile citizen...(guess what, even after having steel rods jammed through his eyeballs, Connery wakes up with his temper and libido undiminished......I guess we all cheer at that point...)
We've always remained the biggest fan of Sir Sean........and the fact that we consider him one of the most watchable actors on the planet accounts for the BQ reluctantly dredging up at least 1 & 1/2 stars for "A Fine Madness" (* 1/2)....a sorry mess for a legendary cinema icon.
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