Heavily populated with instantly recognizable comedic actors, the film turns them loose on a premise that allows all of them to go crazy, each in their own way.........they make the casts of "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad,Mad World" and "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming" look sedate and sane in comparison.......
They play the chain-smoking residents of Eagle Rock, Iowa, a depressed, decrepit, dying dump, hopin' and prayin' for a U.S. Military contract to build a missile manufacturing plant.........a pipe dream unless they get the cash to spiff up the town enough to attract the Army......
Salvation comes from a conniving tobacco exec (Bob Newhart) who, in a brilliant flash of public relations chutzpah, offers the town 25 million if they'll give up smoking for 30 days.......(Bob's betting his job that he'll never have to pay them a dime....)
Both energized and terrified at the prospect of no butts for a month, the town turns to their sanctimonious minister (Dick Van Dyke) to lead them to the promised land of tobacco cash. Van Dyke's Rev. Brooks, like everyone else in the cast, is working on his own agenda - scoring a bigger and better ministry in Dearborn, Michigan.
And so the ordeal commences for the nicotine-deprived Eagle Rockers, who take the loss of their favorite addiction with ever escalating levels of hysteria, violence and increased dependence on sex as a release........(this humping-instead-of-smoking therapy especially helps the good Reverend, and his cowed, emotionally abused wife (Pippa Scott).
Here's where the movie truly takes flight........with Lear's lengthy montages of the unbridled madness that grips the townsfolk, all of these sequences put to rousing, slyly funny music in Randy Newman's first film score. Adults and kids slap each other with abandon and even a puppy get kicked like a football by someone deranged by forced non-smoking.
Beyond the slapstick stuff, the film casts a farcical cold eye on everything it touches upon, right wing fanatics who warp American values, the Machiavellian tobacco companies, and pompous celebrity media figures (lampooned here by the comedy team Bob and Ray, master portrayers of puffed-up 'Boobus Americanus' types)
Though it's never once mentioned in the film, you can easily see the frenzy of Eagle Rock as a metaphor for a nation ripped apart by Vietnam, youth revolution and the divisive Nixon Presidency........all it took to set this town on fire was taking away their only legal addiction.......you can only wonder what they'd be like when they see their young sons shipped home to them in flag-draped coffins.....
Lear doesn't resist the urge to apply a Hollywood candy-coating to his finale.......the film wraps up with a riot worthy of Nathanael West's 'Day Of The Locust'........with three of the film's leads presumably dying of gunshot wounds while the crowd grabs at thousands of cigarettes air-dropped on them at the stroke of midnight.
Finishing up with a perfect, almost inevitable visual gag, "Cold Turkey" is a long lost, unsung gem.....and BQ's coughing up 4 stars (****)........it's only hazardous to your funny bone, which it will tickle without mercy.......
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