See No Evil Hear No Evil
The team of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder rarely get mentioned as being one of the all time great comedy duos, not only because their combined output was so sparse (only 4 films overall) but also because their work at times was so uneven. Silver Streak is a true classic even as Pryor only comes into it about halfway through while most of the film is dominated by Wilder and Stir Crazy (despite being a big hit at the box office) was a mostly unfunny prison comedy with Wilder once again being the more prominent of the two stars. In many ways, their second best effort (with both of them having more equal size roles this time) is this 1989 release with a daring concept (one which had floated around Hollywood for years before finally being made): two disabled friends of which one is deaf and the other is blind are witness to a murder in front of the newsstand in which they both work at and must somehow team up (with one of them having sight and the other being able to hear so they can complement each other) to catch the real killers and clear their name. When you add in that a lot of the humor here is based on verbal puns and outright slapstick thanks to their respective disabilities, then one can see that this whole enterprise is potentially filled with several bad taste landmines that can sink it entirely down to the bottom of the proverbial abyss. In fact, Wilder himself had actually turned it down several times over the years, saying that he would not do a comedy that would mock people’s afflictions in that way. However, upon finding out that Pryor had signed on and was anxious to work with him again, Wilder finally relented on the condition that he be allowed to do a full rewrite of the script. They also both commendably did their homework prior to filming with Pryor spending time at The Braille Institute in Los Angeles (who later disavowed the film for of all things, excessive profanity) and Wilder doing his own research at The NY League For The Hard Of Hearing. The results aren’t quite perfect especially when it comes to Wilder’s portrayal of a deaf character, not engaging in the impaired speech patterns that deaf people are known to have and even more notably, for a character who is supposed to understand what people are saying to him by looking them in the face and reading their lips, you could almost make a drinking game out of the number of times that Pryor says something to Wilder without Wilder even looking at him and Wilder responds to him anyway. And let’s not get started on when late in the film Wilder literally takes on a mock German dialect and does far better with it than any real life deaf person could ever do. The keys to the film though are (as usual) Pryor and Wilder’s peerless chemistry and a few other good ideas scattered here and there as well, the most notable being that the real killer is an extremely beautiful woman (Joan Severance, well on her way to superstardom before embarrassing herself as Hulk Hogan’s awkward romantic lead in his magnum opus known as No Holds Barred) whom the relatively meek and mild Wilder has unabashedly fallen in love with despite still knowing that she is a coldblooded killer. Severance’s partner in crime is played by none other than a prestardom Kevin Spacey who seemingly has put in a little overtime himself to play his assassin as an effete British snob but yet is given very little to say or do in terms of actual comedic value. Pryor does succeed in keeping things on an upbeat note, dropping countless F bombs as he clearly was still aware of the fact that he was one of the funniest people in the world at that time, bringing a bitingly cynical attitude to playing a blind man who refuses to accept that fact, an attitude that was no doubt drawn upon by his own real life struggles with MS. Wilder for his part draws many of his own laughs by playing himself off as being completely oblivious, either misinterpreting things that are said to him or just outright ignoring them due to wherever he’s sitting at that particular moment (and thus cannot read their lips) with a blissfully beatific look on his face. The final act actually features a bit of intrigue as our heroes confront the BigBad Mastermind behind it all (or as Pryor so articulately calls him, “the fat fuck who runs the show”) played by Anthony Zerbe whose appearance brings an interesting twist of its own. Along the way we get an extremely hot nude shower scene from Severance and a couple of bumbling cops whose own schtick is actually better than what we usually see in these types of movies. Even as we watch this film and become acutely aware that we are watching two legendary comedy stars both on the downslide of their magnificent careers, we also come to appreciate the fact that not only are they mostly succeeding with the story’s daringly original concept, but that they are also staying within their own strengths as performers and not trying to do anything which is outside of their boundaries and the film is all the better for it as Pryor at this point was just a stone’s throw away from the full fledged hell of his MS while Wilder would fade away slower due to being a little bit too old to carry these types of films anymore and thus this last hurrah (not counting one more go with 1991’s Another You which is unseen by this reviewer but is said to be painfully bad) is what it is: not the best work of either man by any means but still an acceptably fun and dumb effort which gets plenty of mileage out of a previously thought to be impossible comedy concept…
7/10