Fantasia Obscura: ‘The Maltese Bippy’

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, though, you come to regret what you do in the heat of the moment…

The Maltese Bippy (1969)
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Directed by: Norman Panama

Great things are not accomplished by those who
yield to trends and fads and popular opinion
– Charles Kuralt, 1995

Yes, entertainers have a shelf life.

Someone will come along, be the ‘it’ thing of the moment (which before social media meant a few days or even weeks, not minutes), and then be forgotten like a campaign trail promise after an election. For every eternal great, there’re plenty of performers who before their first appearance finishes are on their way to becoming the subject of a bar trivia question.

Not that they are all ‘one and done,’ as some folks get more than one chance to show up and flame out.

Like these two:

In the 1950s, Dan Rowan met Dick Martin, and the two developed a nightclub comedy act. The act had Rowan being the goofy one while Martin was the straight man, but they soon switched roles and as a result got more bookings in Hollywood and Vegas. Dean Martin was a fan, and they were good friends of other comedians working that circuit, such as Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall. (Yes, that Peter Marshall…)

They were so hot that they got the leads in a comedy film from Universal, Once Upon a Horse… The effort was… well, ‘disappointment’ might be too mild a term…

The duo would go back to nightclubs, where their act could get someone’s eye and might lead to roles in television. And when George Schlatter needed someone to host a comedy pilot for NBC to replace The Man from U.N.C.L.E., he brought the team on board to try and hold together something that TV never expected:

Laugh-In became a very hot property, thanks to the zany writing and talented players that Schlatter surrounded Rowan and Martin with. The duo would do a few moments of schtick here and there in each episode with a few stock phrases, like “Say goodnight, Dick,” making jokes about their dates as swinging bachelors and commenting on the show (like the early running joke about having John Wayne on as a guest), and then let the chaos get as out of control as NBC’s standards and practices group would allow.

There were plenty of quips and gags that became catch phrases, even one or two spoken by Roman and Martin themselves. The pace of the show would slow down a bit as the duo did set-ups and punchlines, while the rest of the players got to their bits and moved things along with pressing-‘like’-button speed, making the show a hit.

What made that show a hit was something the folks at MGM should have seriously considered before they greenlit this pic…

The movie has a few false starts, literally: We get footage set in Medieval times presenting info on “Irving the Horrible,” and then told that this is not germane to the film. We then get a scene where a woman is brutally murdered in a graveyard, before the scene shifts yet again to, well…

Once that’s out of the way, we come to the pic itself, where the duo abandon their schtick to take on other roles, badly. We find Rowan playing Sam Smith, an irrepressible confidence man who’s always trying to keep a step ahead of his creditors. His partner, the man with money that Sam can easily put the touch on easily from across the room, is Ernest Gray, played by Martin. We first see them in Sam’s office trying to shoot an adult sci-fi film with a reluctant starlet, Saundra (Pamela Rodgers). The shoot’s not going well, and isn’t helped much when the landlord comes by to throw Sam out of his offices.

With nowhere to go, Sam cons Ernest into setting up shop in his house, a large property in Flushing, NY. It’s a house Sam talked Ernest into buying, abutting the cemetery, where Ernest lives with his housekeeper, Margaret Fletcher (Mildred Natwick), and two borders, violinist Alex Kornstadt (Leon Askin) and college student Robin Sherwood (Carol Linley).

The murder we saw before the credits took place in the cemetery next to Ernest’s house, which brings Lieutenant Tim Crane (Robert Reed) and Sergeant Kelvaney (Dana Eclar) of the NYPD around to investigate. As they conduct their interviews, Ernest’s physician, Dr. Strauss (David Hurst), drops in to treat his condition, which involves Ernest’s barking and howling at random, as well as other troubling signs that he may be turning into a werewolf.

Added to this cacophony are the next-door neighbors from Hungary. There’s Mr. Ravenswood (Fritz Weaver), his sister Carlotta (Julie Newmar) and Helga (Eddra Gale). These neighbors, they’re creepy and they’re kooky, and project a dark menace, which doesn’t stay in the shadows for too long before they come right out and say it: They’re all werewolves, and are asking Ernest to join their pack.

Ernest wants no part in this, while Sam tries to convince Ernest to be packaged as a new act, a man who turns into a wolf live on stage, looking to get a potential TV special out of the deal. We watch Ernest suffer as Robin tries to comfort him, while Sam tries to exploit the situation by trying to woo Carlotta. And then, things take a turn sideways…

More like “rolled off the train tracks down the side of a mountain” sideways, as the script by Everett Freeman and Ray Singer gives up a long time after it should have. As a horror comedy, it fails badly at both; there are episodes of The Munsters with more chills than the film delivers, and the jokes just really aren’t that funny.

The main reason for the later was a gross misunderstanding of why anyone would come to see the film. What made Rowan and Martin so popular was not anything they themselves particularly did, but their association with Laugh-In, where the rest of the talent did the heavy lifting. There was a conscious choice from the onset that only Rowan and Martin themselves would appear in the film, with no other associations with the program. The fact that the only other person from Laugh-In appearing in the film with the hosts was Rodgers, best known as a dancer in the cocktail party sketches and inter-joke interstitials, shows the folly of this decision.

What Pamela Rodgers is best known for in Laugh-In

Worse still, what Rowan and Martin brought to Laugh-In was their schtick, which only appears in the opening credits sequence above. Having the two of them play characters for an extended period was outside their experience, as the leads no less, and their lack of skillset is evident. The rest of the cast gives short shrift to their characters as written, and still manage to deliver better performances than their leads.

The final product was worse than a disappointment; it made Once Upon a Horse… look like How the West Was Won. Neither Rowan nor Martin would star in another feature film, staying in the confines of television thereafter, where Laugh-In was still a safe haven for them.

They even got John Wayne to finally appear on the show, despite their film’s failure:

In so doing, they managed to extend their shelf life by staying with what they knew, safe in their quick schtick, where they didn’t need to go much beyond, “Say goodnight, Dick.”

Goodnight, Dick…