The Troublemaker

Movies parodying movies were all the rage last year. The French began the fad with Zazie Dans le Metro and two nutty Yalies continued with Hallelujah the Hills. Both works snatched sequences from well-known films and spoofed them in crescendos of utter nonsense. Those versed in the history of the cinema had a gay time recognizing various snippets and whispering snobbish comments to their dates.

Zazie and Hallelujah remained plotless, but Theodore Flicker, who made The Troublemaker, constructed his parody film around the story of a naive chicken farmer named Jack Armstrong who comes to New York to open a coffeehouse. Jack's refusal to pay off the various authorities was meant to echo Marlon Brando's fight with the Longshoremen's Union in On the Waterfront. The touch is far too heavy, and what could be somewhat effective humor gets bogged down in weary detail.

The spoofs are there, though, and the knowledgeable may enjoy picking them out. The trailer truck which pursued Brando down a dark alley in On the Waterfront turns into a garbage truck which swallows victims with its packing mechanism. The same truck later dies the slow death of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One scene deserves special mention as it might even have been worthy of inclusion in Zazie. The gag is on Picnic when Jack and his girlfriend are spread out on the grass discussing life on the farm. Then the camera zooms upward to reveal the couple picnicking on the median strip of Park Avenue. It is easily the most imaginative moment in the movie.

Janus Films, which made David and Lisa, gathered the usual cast of unknowns, only with much less success. Tom Aldredge, playing the inept yokel who gets his hand stuck in a Henry Moore statue, takes an overdose of slapstick. Ted Flicker and Buck Henry, the script-writers, preserve the tradition of amateur movies by taking on about five major roles apiece. Neither can act, however. Godfrey Cambridge provides some saving grace as the fire inspector, but then he speaks only ten lines.

The main problem remains that parody movies had more than run their course after Hallelujah the Hills, and The Troublemaker was doomed to triteness before it was filmed. Thus humor disintegrates into a mechanical game of recognition which becomes very tiring after the first ten minutes.

Lastly, Mr. Flicker had bad taste to choose corny detective and horror movies for the majority of his spoofs. Corn piled atop corn is hardly more tolerable, as The Troublemaker so successfully demonstrates. Jack's neurotic girlfriend sums it up best when she shows him around her zany apartment, a veritable junkyard of art, and explains to him: "I know it's eclectic, but I tried not to repress anything."