What a Way to Go! is a striking comedy that starts stronger than it ends. It’s topped with an impossible to not love cast, absurdist wit, and a runtime of 110 minutes that feels longer. The opening credits were surprising due to all of the big names that I recognized. Shirley MacLaine is the protagonist, Louisa May Foster. Fortunately she’s really good. She has to be as through the film she interacts with a lot of characters comedically. It’s the job of those various characters to be unique and funny. MacLaine does a great job of playing off them all in a more or less straight man role. The first comedic interaction is between Louisa and psychiatrist Dr. Victor Stephanson, played by Bob Cummings. The two exchange very goofy comedy of mistakes, confusion, and shock which sets the tone for the film. One particularly funny exchange is “I poured water on you. I’m terribly sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do.” “No, it-it’s all right. You did the right thing.” The two are so funny together that you’d expect them to have more shared scenes than they do. In fact, the scenes with Cummings could be cut from the film and the plot would remain virtually the same. Every performance in the film is well handled, though not every actor gets good material.
While the movie begins with a break-neck wit, problems unseam more and more over the course of the film. Louisa as a child is played by MacLaine. It’s a little weird seeing her playing so much younger than she actually is, but it would be jarring to have a different actress for a few moments, so it is better to have her than not. The best option would’ve been to remove the scenes of the character until she was a young adult. As a side step, her mother criticizes her house for being so poor but from the eye of a gen-zer in 2022, it’s really nice. I’ve seen similar houses be insanely expensive. Despite being a big Hollywood production, there are weird mistakes. In one scene, Louisa’s hair is made messy, only to be fine in the next shot. In another scene, a painting in the background looks different between shots. A favorite moment was when after swimming in a river, Louisa’s face is perfectly made up. If you aren’t going to make her look like someone who just went for a swim, then don’t include that in the plot! None of the little continuity errors are dire, but it gives the film a shoddiness that presumably was easily avoidable.
Another oddity that keeps popping up are scenes of Louisa showing a lot of skin. It’s as if the screenwriters wanted to find as many excuses as possible to show her body off. Various outfits emphasize her legs, often at the cost of practicality for the character. At one point, Stephanson accidentally grabbed her butt. That was probably an accident on Cummings’ part, but it’s representative of the film as a whole. Perhaps one of the most gratuitous parts of the film is when Louisa is naked other than a blanket over her. The blanket is positioned in such a way to show her legs, arms, and basically everything other than what wouldn’t be allowed to be shown. We then get shots of her kissing a man while naked in different bathtubs. This is rivaled by a later scene where she wears a variety of dresses. The last of which apparently has no top. And I mean nothing. We only see her backside, but there’s no sign of her wearing anything on the top half of her body other than a necklace. Even the bottom part of this outfit just barely covers her butt for the most part, though you can see the very top of it at some points. Do the filmmakers have no shame in displaying Shirley MacLaine like this for no reason and constantly?
The biggest issue with the film is how inconsequential it feels. There’s a storyline that must be followed and everything must bend to it. Louisa’s actions make less and less sense due to the amount of times she has to make a certain decision that progresses the story but isn’t something she would do based on how she thinks or acts. For the whole film, she expresses that she likes being poor, but is passive and accepting of wealth when it comes to her. Minor plot elements are dropped when the story moves past them. There’s a little conflict setup between Louisa and her mother, but the mother is last seen or referenced very early on. It would’ve been nice to see her at the end. Stories should have a point and it seems that the point of this one is to give a spotlight to these little kooky performances. That’s all well and good, but let’s actually get a storyline that can respect these performances without stepping on its own toes. Mel Brooks’ film, Silent Movie, features a plot specifically about finding people in kooky ways, so the tangents are more welcomed. Both that movie and this one feature Paul Newman!
Fortunately, I didn’t know the film’s premise until I watched the thing. After seeing the beginning of the movie, you’d think it’d go in a different direction than it actually goes…
SPOILERS
The first fourth of the runtime focused primarily on Louisa and Dick Van Dyke’s character, Edgar Hopper. The two have very good romantic vibes and when they marry, there’s a satisfied feeling left in you. We get a handful of reasons for Louisa to love him, such as that they both like being poor and Edgar is so kind when the rich and stuck-up Leonard Crawley, played by Dean Martin, ruins Edgar’s clothes on purpose. Edgar is encouraged to become rich and succeeds in doing so, in the process ruining Crawley’s business. Edgar then dies from overworking. This isn’t expected other than if you figured it from the foreshadowing of Edgar saying, “A little hard work never killed anybody.”, saw Dyke’s name relatively low in the opening credits, or knew the film’s premise. The film’s premise is that Louisa marries a man, the man’s wealth somehow leads to his death, then she marries another. This happens four times.
A big issue here is that once Louisa marries her second husband, Larry Flint, played by Paul Newman, and the movie begins to cover similar ground as the Dyke part of the story, you know what’s going to happen. Larry and Louisa marry at around the forty minute mark. Louisa’s fourth and final husband dies at around the hundred minute mark. For that full hour, I was waiting for the same motions to be run through before the film moves on. The husbands after Edgar have less care put into them because the filmmakers knew that didn’t matter. Edgar probably only got the brighter treatment so as to make his death more surprising. On one hand, it’s good not to focus on pointless plot details but on the other hand, the relationships feel so forced.
The four husbands, in order, are Hopper, Flint, Robert Mitchum as Rod Anderson Jr., and Gene Kelly as Pinky Benson. The first, second, and fourth of them all have deliberately avoided becoming rich, only to crave and succeed at becoming so in no time at all. There’s not much rationale to why they suddenly want this. It kind of made sense with Hopper, who is made fun of by Leonard Crawley, and Benson, who for the first time gets an audience to really like him, so he hungers for more. Those reasons are too thin, unapologetically just to move the plot along. They never struggle much to hit it big, instead it is just there like it’s nothing. The impression is thus given that what we’re seeing doesn’t matter. It’s all going to fly by before you know it. This is most jarring with Flint. He decries wealth only to change his tune the same day after he sells a painting he didn’t really make. This is completely opposed to his philosophy. At least we get a really clever moment where Flint’s change is shown by Beethoven’s fifth. The music is diegetic and is very appropriate due to its somber and dramatic impressing.
The weakest part of the film is the Robert Mitchum part. In his first scene, he is basically just explained to the audience, who and how he is. As a twist, he is rich from when he met Louisa. After the character’s introductory moments, there’s a brief narration that the two got married. At the point of their marriage, there wasn’t any romance shown between them. They do get some moments during their marriage, but they’re not strong enough to make their affections understood. Most of them loving each other is shown in a montage of Anderson telling Louisa, “Remind me to tell you later that I love you.” I’d like to think that one of the screenwriters wrote, “Remind me to give a reason for Anderson to love her” and that line was utilized in place of actual reasons. Every Anderson scene goes through what you’d expect to continue the story without a sense of self-importance. He gets less screen time than the other husbands, so that may have been understood by the writers. The biggest distinction between Anderson and the other husbands is that he becomes poor instead of rich. On the plus side, Anderson gets a few funny moments, like the scene where he tries to milk a bull.
The character should’ve been altered significantly or just cut out of the film. It’s best illustrated here in the story that Louisa has become less and less like a real person. Her antics get more cartoonish as she embraces the rich lifestyle until she thinks it’ll kill her husband. She says she’ll never marry again after each widowing. Here is where that line breaks into a sort-of self parody. Yeah, there ya go saying that, but we know you’ll marry the first man you see!
The Pinky Benson part is an improvement due to better material for Kelly but is ultimately inconsequential. This is exemplified by a line of dialogue from Louisa to Dr. Stephanson, “Well you haven’t said anything for the last two husbands.” One might imagine that the film would end with a fifth marriage that’s ambiguous on whether it will end in the husband’s demise. Just that is delivered, though the film is a little more clever than one might think. Dr. Stephanson proposes to Louisa. She gives the funny line, “Victor, I’m honored that you’d risk your life for me” and says no. Louisa then runs into Leonard Crawley, who is now a broke janitor and they fall in love. This was unexpected and really funny.
This is mostly a very good twist, though it would’ve been nicer if he was portrayed as slightly less of a jerk in the beginning, so as to make her ultimate affection more realistic. Crawley at one point just appears in Hopper and Louisa’s house to make fun of them, without announcing his presence. Such a scene shows that Crawley’s a jerk who will just show up to make you feel bad. Another reason to cut or change the Anderson character is that he is the only disruption of the man-becomes-rich formula before the ending. His absence would emphasize Louisa ultimately marrying a man who was rich, then became poor. Crawley is the second time she married someone rich-to-poor, but it should’ve been the first.
Every husband offers a new flavor to the pot of the story. There’s a range between serious and funny. They all manage to leave an impression and something to like about them. To rank Louisa’s husbands, first would be the ever-lovable Edgar Hopper, thanks to the ever-lovable Dick Van Dyke. Second is Pinky Benson, the funniest of the husbands, though he’s closely trailed by Larry Flint, who receives the weirdest performance as Newman takes him from very rounded to very absurd to partially mad. Dr. Victor Stephanson will be clocked as an honorary husband. He has very good comedic chemistry with Louisa, but not romantic chemistry. Rod Anderson does crack out a few well-deserved laughs. He is a good distinguished rich type character. Lastly is Leonard Crawley. Most of his scenes are of him being unlikable and we don’t get much of him at the end. He is probably a perfectly fine person, as he says he mellowed out upon becoming poor. If he had more to do at the end, he might place above Stephanson, though such scenes are better off absent for the sake of pacing. They aren’t needed anyway. This is the end of the movie! No more character development!
OVERVIEW
It’s difficult to not get something out of a film so unapologetic and ridiculous. There’s enough good performances and solid humor to skate past the negatives. The plenty of little novelties float the film by. It wisely stays under two hours, lots of movies like this one want to be two to three and a half hours long. The added runtime is often spent on filler. What a Way to Go! should probably be shorter, but it isn’t too dulling as is. And hey, it features Dick Van Dyke doing a goofy silent film pastiche with his character’s wife before doing the exact same thing five years later in The Comic. What’s not to love?
The Filme Diary 