SnoopyStyle Rainbow Studio is falling behind rival Paramount with their matinée star Rudolph Valentino. Studio head Adolph Zitz (Dom DeLuise) intends to find the next sex symbol for his movie "The World's Greatest Lover". He is surrounded by Yes men and gets violent whenever somebody disagrees. Rudy Hickman (Gene Wilder) from Milwaukee is filled with neuroses. When he gets nervous, he does one of three things. He either sticks out his tongue, gets hysterical laryngitis or mixes up his words. He gets fired again and decides to go to Hollywood with his innocent new wife Annie (Carol Kane) to win that Greatest Lover contest. Annie is tired of living with Rudy and leaves him in search for Rudolph Valentino.There is one hilarious scene with Sex by the Numbers. It gets me every time. It's a great bit but the rest of the movie isn't that funny. Rudy Hickman is not a likable guy. The main problem is that he's so dismissive to his wife Annie. That is a real problem for him being the World's Greatest Lover. It's also tough to laugh with the guy.

Katrina Haywood Gene Wilder (Rudy Hickman) keeps having trouble with the jobs he's had due to his constant daydreaming or his so called "nervous behavior" dealing with sticking his tongue out at people and temporary voice loss. He decides to go to LA with his wife Carol Kane (Annie Hickman) and change his name to Rudy Valentine to try out to become 'The World's Greatest Lover'. He soon questions if it's really worth ending his marriage to become something he really isn't. Dom Deluise also stars as the head of Rainbow Studios who came up with the idea of searching for 'The World's Greatest Lover'. After seeing Rudy's screen test (Dom) picks him to be one of the top 3 finalists to win a movie contract with Rainbow.

marcomeyer When I saw this movie on TV some decennials ago, I found it quite funny, because Gene Wilder was "in" at that time. We youngsters longed for more comedies with him after having seen him in the outrageous (is it still seen this way today?) "Young Frankenstein". The movie has its wonderful and romantic moments, sometimes even funny ones. Just enjoy it as a light-weight spoof, as a slapstick-comedy, and if you're a tongue-out-of-your-mouth-sticker, this is definitely the number one movie for you, for it is THE running gag of the show (if you like it or not). Yes, there are many clichés repeated over and over, like for instance Fritz Feld doing his standard hotel receptionist number, but there are so many little fun jewels hidden everywhere. Take for instance the scene when Gene/Rudy, in his exaggerated Hollywood craze thinks he sees Greta Garbo dancing in the hotel garden, falling/jumping on "her" dancing partner, only to detect Garbo is a transvestite. Cheep joke? From today's view perhaps, but not at its time. There were lots of comedies like this one which generate hardly more than a moan today (even the Mel Brooks series). If you can ever get hand on a VHS tape of this movie, grab it and watch it. Simply watch it. Be romanced. Be funny. Forget the cruel world and your cineast attitude. Leave your brain at home. Just watch (and enjoy) that movie!

tedg Spoilers herein. There's a simple kind of film humor, a movie that provides an excuse for an intrinsically funny guy to do his/her thing. And then there are films like this which are themselves funny. In that case, the comedians can inhabit something instead of merely standing on it. Very often, such funny constructions are self-referential films: movies about movies, even movies about themselves as movies. This particular example is great: love (even sex) moving from real life through a pretend life in movieland. Then they come back to real life, but not really: the layers have become combined. We have dozens and dozens of examples of this form in our database. Alas, this one doesn't work so well. Wilder isn't what his name implies. He's the audience, the white space against which a comic maniac (like Zero Mostel in "The Producers") bounces. Carol Kane is more flexible, but of the same stripe. Its an amazing mistake which underscores the reality that much of the time, talented people just guess about what works, using their very limited home world. Too bad. This man -- like many actors who think they can direct -- needed to be saved from himself. Comedy can be left to intuition for a performer, but in sculpting a film, you need to have a theory to work with. That's unless you can make enough noise to substitute, like the Marxes or (sometimes) Robin Williams. Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.