World's Greatest Lover [DVD]

While I do like this film as a guilty pleasure, I have to be critical and objective and come clean: World's Greatest Lover is an uneven, undercooked and juvenile comedy that sums up the excesses of 70s comedies. The plot, in short, is about a neurotic baker who goes with his wife to Hollywood to screen test for a new film. However, his wife is obsessed with star Rudolph Valentino, and decides to chase after him, and well, mishaps ensue with plenty of slapstick and awkward situations.

The production values and score by underrated master John Morris (a Brooks regular, as well as Elephant Man) deliver, recreating the 'Old Hollywood' feel of the 1920s, and the actors are never awful or bored, with Dom Deluise in fine form as the cartoonish studio boss, but the humour is what makes the film so hard to recommend: it follows an underbaked (and these days, overused) formula of slapstick, awkward situations and plenty of shouting and eye-bogging from Gene. Rise and repeat for an hour an a half, and that's the film. Gene Wilder has no control (he wrote, starred, directed and produced this) and without the steady hand of someone like Mel Brooks, he goes way past over-the-top and almost like someone parodying Wilder, screaming like a banshee every couple of seconds. Though his opening dance number is fun, and probably the highlight.

It's worth owning if you're a hardcore fan of Wilder or wacky comedies, and it's taken a LONG time for this to finally recieve a DVD release of any sort, but, aside from aficionados, you're better off with Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles.

a good movie not one of gene wilder's best.but i like it for nostalgic reasons as it takes me back to my youth.there are some great visual gags to be seen

Coming out at the same time as Ken Russell's rather more amusing Valentino, The World's Greatest Lover suffers from Gene Wilder's sporadic tendency to mistake the grotesque for the side-splitting. Thus we get the odd huge close-up of mouths covered in shaving foam and a lot of tiresome hysteria and tongues. We also get far more of Dom DeLuise mugging away as if semaphore were back in fashion than is strictly necessary, though he's not as OTT here as in Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, for which we can at least be grateful. Unfortunately, we get much more of Wilder's tendency to mistake hysteria for the hysterical - when in doubt, shout seems to be his motto - with Wilder adding a nervous tic that sees him stick out his tongue when he gets nervous. And he gets nervous a lot. Be still my aching ribs...

It's a reworking of Fellini's near career killing early flop The White Sheik, even including a Felliniesque lineup of hookers at a bus stop in one scene, only without Fellini's restraint (yes, you did read that right), with Wilder's unemployed baker heading for Hollywood to enter a screen test to find the next Valentino while his young wife seeks out the real thing. Wilder does acknowledge the debt in a screen credit that's part thank you to `my friend', but seems more name-dropping in a film that comes across as something of a vanity project - certainly with Wilder starring, writing, directing, producing and even writing a song for the film, it's fair to say where the buck stops on this one. One of those films that at once offers fairly lavish period production design but often a complete lack of understanding of silent cinema - yes, we do get sped-up comedy scenes - it's definitely pre-Kevin Brownlow's Hollywood, which completely destroyed most of the then-common myths about silent cinema that this embraces. Indeed, anachronisms abound, with the feel (and the songs) often more Thirties than Twenties, which perhaps wouldn't matter quite so much if it were all funnier. It's not a total disaster - there's the odd good line (a conductor announcing "Hollywood, home of the stars and several featured players"), a nicely natural performance from Carol Kane before she became a mess of mannerisms to rival Wilder and it does offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see James Hong playing a Norwegian (or is it Svedish?) studio executive, complete with excellent accent. (Also to be glimpsed among the bit parts in the supporting cast are Danny De Vito as an assistant director, Billy Sands - Paparelli in Sergeant Bilko - as a studio guard and, as the boss of a bakery, David Huddleston, here billed as `Michael Huddleston's Father'!)

Fox's DVD offers a decent 1.85:1 widescreen transfer, but doesn't include Gene Wilder audio commentary from the Region 1 disc - admittedly no great loss since it's so sparing and uninformative and filled with dead air pauses of several minutes at a time that you'll wonder if you clicked the wrong button on your menu!