Cinema: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Race

You probably haven't heard of this new movie, which opens this week. If you have, it may not seem very appealing. Paramount's TV ads are ho-hum. The title has the word "rat" in it, which has all the allure of "colonoscopy." So do yourself a favor, turn to our critic's review on the following page, and take his advice: Go see it. Even in Hollywood, Paramount's competition has been murmuring respectfully about Rat Race's remarkably successful test screenings. And you should also be aware that the film actually has nothing whatsoever to do with rodents.

Quite the contrary. It stars Monty Python vet John Cleese as a Las Vegas casino titan who sends some hapless losers on a cross-country race, all for the amusement of a bunch of inveterate international gamblers wagering on which desperado will grab the prize: $2 million in a remote bus-station locker. Before the race is over, Whoopi Goldberg is stranded in the desert; Seth Green and Vince Vieluf, as two brothers whose greed is matched only by their stupidity, get trapped--in their Ford Bronco--atop an airport radar tower; a cow flies; Cuba Gooding Jr. hijacks a bus full of Lucille Ball look-alikes; and a nice Jewish couple played by Jon Lovitz and Kathy Najimy steal Hitler's car from a neo-Nazi museum. "We have, I think, one of the funniest movies in the world," says Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing. "But we have a marketing challenge."

That's because the $52 million comedy has no buzz. Despite raucous reaction at previews, surveys show that the general public doesn't have much awareness of the movie. Jokes are too elaborate to capture in a 30-second TV spot, and there's no Julia Roberts above the title to grab our attention. But in a summer full of craven action flicks made with the marketing department rather than the audience in mind, Rat Race stands out as an unabashed, family-friendly crowd pleaser.

It was a renegade project from the beginning. Two years ago, while the rest of Hollywood was trying to capitalize on the teen gross-out craze, Lansing was feeling nostalgic for the old chase formula, which had peaked in 1963 with Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman and a Who's Who of comics in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and hadn't been revisited since Burt Reynolds took to the road in the Cannonball Run flicks some 20 years ago. "I remember those comedies," says Lansing, "and I enjoyed them. I said, 'My God, what happened to that genre?'" Paramount hired Andy Breckman, a writer best known for his work with Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, who penned a screenplay free of fart jokes and full of ambitious, carefully crafted gags. Enter Jerry Zucker.