Get To Know Your Rabbit 92 min color (USA, 1972) DIR: Brian De Palma. SCR: Jordan Crittenden. PROD: Steven Bernhardt, Paul Gaer. MUSIC: Jack Elliott, Allyn Ferguson. DOP: John A. Alonzo. CAST: Tom Smothers, John Astin, Katharine Ross, Orson Welles, Allen Garfield. (Warner Bros.)
A bridge between Brian De Palma’s comical underground films and his later mainstream Hitchcockian fare, this goofy movie could have been a little goofier. Repressed ad exec Donald Beeman (Tom Smothers) quits his job… to become a magician! The punchline is that his new vocation influences enough people to form a corporation there as well! This is a great concept for an irreverent picture, however the delivery of it is still somewhat lacking. To De Palma’s credit, he maintains that Warner Brothers wouldn’t give him more time to work on the movie, and it shows, but the ideas are there. The ongoing irony is that Beeman quits the corporate lifestyle, only to find that everyone is besieging him with a corporate agenda– from the guy who comes to tune his piano (Beeman doesn’t own one), to Vic (played by the great Allen Garfield, previously seen as the hilarious smut peddler in De Palma’s Greetings) who picks out some brassieres for his one-night stand. (Even the chatter is businesslike: “So, how long have you been a cheap broad?” / “Oh, off and on for a couple of years now.”) The person who phones the office with a bomb threat does so in a professional way! Too bad the material isn’t more developed– they really had something here. De Palma seems more interested in his already masterful use of split-screen technique, to simultaneously depict contrasting scenarios. He even achieves this with an overhead shot of two rooms, with the adjoining wall acting as the partition. (No doubt his pal Martin Scorsese took notes for Taxi Driver.) This film also stars John Astin as Paul Turnbull, who will do anything to get Smothers back on the job (he puts the bombers on hold!), Katharine Ross (already trickling down from Butch Cassidy to curios like this) as The Terrific-Looking Girl, and Orson Welles, who teaches him the tricks of the magician’s trade (and how to talk back to hecklers).
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #10 (“Summer in the 70s”).
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.