I'm rewatching my favorite film now and just realized that most of the film is a comedy. Yes, there is Little Ratbags with his wisecracks, but the rest of them are unintentionally funny throughout the whole film. Originally I watched it as a tragedy, but with a (spoiler) happy ending. So when Richard Attenborough has that scene where he laughs and turns into crying, it sums up the whole film!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr9de4C3wco&t=3898s
That's certainly a unique way of seeing this..
I've seen this film a lot of times, and no one I ever watched it with laughed or otherwise thought it funny when Lew was reaching the point of mental breakdown and confusing/combining laughter with crying, which by the way was one of the most brilliant pieces of acting in a cast full of name-brand actors.
Actually someone on the original IMDB boards (now Filmboards) said whenever he saw that scene with Dorfmann admitting to be a model plane designer he burst out laughing, and I didn't see it as funny then. But if you see the whole film as tragicomedy it is! But I'm thinking of all the scenes prior to that. Yes they were all great actors and all at the top of their game here. By the way I've got autographed photos from Richard & George.
But think about it: Ratbags making jokes, Cobb hilariously over-the-top, Moran overly dramatic, and Heinrich as the mad hatter. Not to mention Watson and his sprained foot routine.
It's not a comedy, it's a suspense drama with a sense of humor... and an unusual plot twist at the finale that I really like!
That's how plot twists are supposed to work, they make you re-think everything you've seen up to that point, and realize that some of your conclusions were wrong... and in a way that makes you feel better about humanity as a whole.
I would call it a survival story with humor, i.e. a tragicomedy. It's my favorite film so I know pretty much all aspects of it, including the original source material by Elliston Trevor. And off screen the cast were having a crazy drunken time in Yuma.
Except Paul Mantz who died doing the stunts.
For me to call something a "dramady" or "tragicomedy" or any similar terms, it has to have more laugh lines than this movies. It's a survival-adventure-drama story, much much more than a comedy.
shareIn real life a lot of people defuse extreme stress with humor.
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