Stir Crazy (1980)

I would not have expected a movie where Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor escape from prison under the cover of a rodeo to exist, but here we are. I feel like this movie has the seeds of 3 or 4 interesting movies, but doesn't develop most of them.

It starts with Wilder as a struggling playwright who moonlights as a department store detective, but seems a little off-kilter (prone to laughing hysterically at strange moments, I'm not sure if he was supposed to have some sort of nervous condition or what), while his friend (Pryor) is an actor not getting a lot of run on Broadway, working as a waiter. OK, do something with the struggling artists bit, either them trying to find professional success, or find peace and happiness in some other way.

But Wilder convinces Pryor that New York City is too stifling. They should move to California, where the real job opportunities and hot women are. Now it could be a road trip movie as they cross the U.S. in a beat to shit van. I gotta say, I was really excited at that prospect, because a Pryor/Wilder road trip movie sounds like it could be fantastic.

Except the van breaks down in some Southwestern town, so they get temporary jobs at a bank, after Wilder convinces the bank manager to try a new ad campaign that involves our protagonists doing a song and dance number in the bank lobby while dressed in brightly colored bird costumes. OK, so you could do the story about a couple of outsiders in a town. Strangers in a strange land, that kind of thing. 

But two rednecks that took a dislike to Wilder at a bar steal the costumes, rob the bank, framing Wilder and Pryor and getting them sentenced to 125 years in prison. So now it's a "survive prison" movie, and that's mostly what it is from then on. There's a large, silent guy that everyone is terrified of, but Wilder and Pryor (somehow) manage to befriend. We don't see how; the chief guard (Craig T. Nelson) adds the big guy to their cell to try and make Wilder agree to participate in the prison rodeo, and the next morning they're all playing cards. There's a gay inmate constantly flirting with Pryor, to his great discomfort. Nelson is opposed to letting Wilder be their top bull rider, because he has some professional he wants to use (who is also a feared figure around the prison yard for some reason.) The warden's bent, because all the money from the rodeo is supposed to go to the prisoners, but he hoards it.

The movie does acknowledge, without really hammering on it, the different perspectives Wilder and Pryor have on prison and the justice system in general. Wilder keeps thinking that everything will be fine. They're innocent, and innocent people don't go to jail. In prison, he keeps acting as though the guards and warden are reasonable people who are openly to calmly discussing the conditions and care about the prisoner's well-being. Pryor is far more pessimistic, at every turn trying to get Wilder to shut the hell up and keep his head down. He may be surprised at the severity of their sentence, but not that they were found guilty. We never see him meet with their lawyer when the lawyer visits, only Wilder. Which implies Wilder's the only one putting any faith in them getting out on appeal.

There's a weak romantic subplot where Wilder becomes infatuated with the cousin of their public defender (the cousin is helping out the lawyer out of the goodness of her heart.) There's the escape during the rodeo, at the same time the cousin has found proof they're innocent. The movie has a training montage of Pryor practicing being a rodeo clown (as the escape requires him to be part of Wilder's "crew"), which I thought was going to come into play during the climax. You know, Pryor's free and clear, but sees Wilder in trouble and has to jump back in to save him. But it's OK because they're proven innocent.

The movie even sets up the chance when the pro bull rider and Craig T. Nelson plot to make Wilder ride a horse called "Untamed." But if Wilder was ever in any danger, it passed so subtly I didn't even notice, and the rodeo clown thing never comes up. Just that brief training bit which is mostly Pryor nervously trying to find the one word that will piss the bull off and make it chase him. To be fair, I did actually laugh at that sequence.

It's like they had a ton of ideas they tried to cram in one movie, but they needed to pick one and really commit to it. If you want to do a prison movie, do a damn prison movie. Or a rodeo movie, or a "city slickers in a country-western town" movie, or whatever. I'd say at best, they went like 60% on the prison movie, but even a lot of that was the rodeo thing.