Watching this film 51 years after its release, we often found ourselves shaking with laughter......but not at anything we saw on our TV screen, even though the movie practically gives itself a stroke trying to be funny.......
Our guffaws were purely unintentional, as we shook our heads in disbelief at some of the stuff in here.....scenes and attitudes that in today's world of Wokeness and Cancel Culture, would destroy the careers of anyone involved.......
Where's Poppa? (1970) directed by Carl Reiner and written by Robert Klane stands apart from other old films featuring dark humor and behavior now rendered out-of-date and offensive.
Reiner and Klane set out to make a movie that's intentionally outrageous, disgusting and offensive. They were fishing for gasps and jaw-drops from an audience by loading up the movie with as many taboo shattering sequences they could think of.......(or we should say.....what they thought of as taboo shattering sequences....)
The film so exhausts itself waving its freak flag, that after a few minutes into it, we could sense how phony, insincere and deliberately manufactured it was......the product of mainstream guys pretending they're rebels. .
Reiner and Klane were far from outlaw filmmakers......they were more like 12 year old boys making smutty prank phone calls to the neighbors, then hanging up.
For 82 punishing minutes, the film subjects us to the tribulations of a sad sack, nebbish lawyer (George Segal, at the peak of his young leading man stardom). afflicted with a senile mother (the always grating Ruth Gordon) whom he periodically tries to frighten into heart failure.
Oblivious to his hatred of her, Gordon responds by pulling his pants down to lovingly smooch and caress his bare ass - the movie's much heralded "tush scene". You get the vibe here, right?
Segal gets no help from his equally manic brother (the overacting Ron Leibman) who's regularly stripped and robbed by a group of black muggers. Later in the film, the muggers manage to enlist Leibman into gang raping an undercover cop who's posing as a woman.......and who later sends Leibman a bouquet of flowers as a pleasant memory of their time together. We made no attempt to figure that one out......(feel free to roll your eyes and groan....)
If those aren't enough nausea inducing moments for you, there's a little bonus moment the film throws in that still sadly rings true today......when Leibman, in a gorilla suit (don't ask), has no trouble catching a cab that's just sailed right past a black woman who was trying to hail it.
We won't go on......the film reeked of phoniness, a clumsy attempt to make a slick duplication of the some of the off-the-wall, independent satires in circulation, . like Brian DePalma's "Hi Mom" and "Greetings", and Robert Downey Sr.'s "Putney Swope"
And for true big studio, big budget outlaw movie-making, all 1970 audiences had to do was wait a few more months for Russ Meyer's "Beyond the Valley Of The Dolls" (with a script by Roger Ebert! Check out our post on that from 6/21/18)
As for "Where's Poppa"......of course now un-woke as hell.......and still a stale piece of crap all these years later. Zero stars (0).
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