Cinema: Comedy: Big Bucks, Few Yuks

What is the sound of one man not laughing?

There are few more dispiriting recreations than sitting in a movie theater watching a failed comedy with a large audience. They came to have a good time. They've already paid for it. So, by God, they will have a good time—even if the experience is as sad and mechanical as two hours with a lethargic masseuse. These days, too many comedies are in the hands of writers and directors rehashing tired formulas, retyping favorite old jokes, doing the expected. Funny thing is, audiences still do the expected too: they go, and they laugh. This holiday season, moviegoers are flocking to such putative laff-riots as Popeye, Nine to Five and the quartet of movies below. Maybe people simply enjoy sharing the sound of their own laughter: it's one of the few ways Americans have left to make a joyful noise.

STIR CRAZY

Directed by Sidney Poitier

Screenplay by Bruce Jay Friedman

This film's premise is simple: contrive, however flimsily, to get Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor into standard comic peril—a barroom fight, a mistaken-identity bank heist, a kangaroo court, a venal prison system, a convicts' rodeo, a speeding car—then watch them wriggle out with their resourceful wit and eloquent body language. Wilder moves with the psychotic serenity of someone who believes everything will turn out O.K.; Pryor trembles with the neurotic certainty that everything has already gone wrong. Wilder's is the fantasy of the liberal do-gooder; Pryor's is the reality of the mean-streets black. As Wilder ejaculates into the air, spouting whinnies and karate grunts, Pryor quakes in his boots, murmuring an awed, all-purpose excretive expletive. These two guys are splendid to watch.

Perhaps Pryor does too much watching: Wilder gets to do all the arabesques while his partner waits for him to fall to earth. Viewers too must stand around as Stir Crazy makes wrong turns, slogs across Saharas of unnecessary plotting, and unravels at its denouement. But that may simply make the triumph of Wilder and Pryor all the more savory. Recipe for a popular movie: take a series of stock situations, two gifted farceurs, and stir. Crazy!

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN

Directed by Buddy Van Horn

Screenplay by Stanford Sherman

This is the second in Clint Eastwood's "Philo and Clyde" series, which began two years ago with the enormously successful, whimsically reprehensible Every Which Way But Loose. Eastwood's Philo Beddoe is an amiable auto mechanic who hulks through the West saving damsels in distress and giving big bullies savage whuppings, the sound effects of which they will never forget. His menagerie includes a dotty ma (Ruth Gordon), a slow-witted pal (Geoffrey Lewis), a not-entirely-trustworthy girlfriend (Sondra Locke), a bumbling gang of neo-Nazi motorcyclists and an orangutan named Clyde, who steals the show with animal athletics and a vocabulary of obscene grimaces. Eastwood, who can be a compelling, charming screen actor, seems content here to watch the other performers pamper their eccentricities while he stands off to one side, as glum and immobile as a Teamster's ashtray.