Stir Crazy (1980).
I wanted to watch Stir Crazy because I saw this interview that Gene Wilder did with Dick Cavett, where he tries to break down the chemistry between him and Richard Pryor, an interview that is juicy and pretty bi (I wrote a whole essay about its bi-ness in particular lmao). I wanted to see this so-called chemistry in action, so I got the movie, put it on. In Stir Crazy, Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder play two friends who get fired from their jobs on the same day—Pryor’s character Harry gets fired because he accidentally put weed in the food at a dinner party, and Wilder’s character Skip because he weirded out a customer by saying he was the store detective and then made all of these wild claims about what she’d done. Skip says he’s tired of New York and then gets Harry to run away with him. Picture this, he says, me, you—he pauses, then adds, and some girls!—on the beach. This movie is kind of queer-coded in how Skip and Harry do everything together, while also trying to get ahead of the accusations by haphazardly throwing some girls in the mix. Wilder’s arm is continually around Pryor’s waist, they pee in a toilet bowl at the same time, they wake up together and try to put on a singular pair of pants. They juxtapose Pryor’s character against a gay Black man in the prison where they end up, but then they befriend that man. The movie is not quite outwardly inclusive, but its subconscious seems to be so, with queerness and with race.
Stir Crazy has a diverse cast without making a big deal of it. Its background actors are also diverse, including a number of Black people in the crowd at a rodeo where Skip and Harry end up. The bully at the prison (whom they also befriend) seems intentionally White, whereas some of the best other characters in the prison are Black, one who gives a monologue about a surgery gone wrong, one who tries to teach Harry about what it means to be a “bull clown” (it’s not as fun as Harry thought it would be). While there’s still discrimination in the movie, and it’s still a Black buddy film—a Black character there to aid in the shenanigans of a White protagonist—it feels more agential than Black buddy films tend to be. Pryor—despite all of the chemistry Wilder discussed in his interview—seemed most alive in scenes with other people of color. He seems genuinely deflated by Wilder’s hilarity, playing off of it in a way that’s not quite deadpan as much it is an absence of feeling. Pryor plays himself, disgruntled, but put him in a scene with the other guys at the prison, and he wakes up.
There’s the scene where a guy is going on about a surgery gone wrong, and Pryor’s reactions feel both entertaining and present. He asks follow-up questions, he cowers, he runs out of the hospital. There’s a scene where all of the main cast are hanging out in one big cell that they’ve negotiated for themselves, a cell with a lamp and a refrigerator, and Harry is winding yarn up with the gay Black man, and Richard Pryor, playing Harry, seems both present and, for once, calm. If most of the time, he seems like himself but a little bothered, there are flickers in this moment of him transcending himself, usually when he isn’t having to respond to Wilder’s naiveté with something like a disenchanted wisdom.
To be fair, Wilder is kind of hilarious in this movie. He reminds me of Will Ferrell in Elf with his optimism and his ignorance and his willingness to go further and further for the joke, yes, but also just to see what’s there. One of my favorite scenes is when he’s put in a wooden box for three days, and then, when they open the door and wait to see how it’s transformed him, he says, “One more day please, I was just beginning to get into myself.” Sometimes, the naiveté gets tiring, but other times, there are these moments where you don’t expect what he’ll do next, and it lifts the whole film to some other less Hollywood-esque place.
I like that in this movie Pryor is a balance to Wilder, but he isn’t there to save him. He instead throughout the film has moments of trying to leave Wilder behind to at least get himself free. At their trial, when Wilder keeps saying, We didn’t do it, Pryor says, I didn’t do it! He told me he didn’t do it, but I definitely didn’t do it! When Wilder, throughout the movie, thinks he can resolve situations that are clearly way too dangerous for him to wander into, Pryor doesn’t go with him and he doesn’t stop him, he warns him, but then he just sits and waits to see what will happen next. Wilder, at one point, talking to their lawyers, says, We want…, and then he pauses, adds, Well, I think I can speak for Harry. That inclusion of “I think,” that moment of pause, makes this movie different from one where he knows he can speak for Harry, one where Harry is the only Black person in a White world and his job is to save Skip. Here, there are a number of Black people, and they’re in a prison, but not everyone is Black, and the scariest of the people inside are White, and Harry can speak for himself.
I wanted to see this movie because I was intrigued by the chemistry between Pryor and Wilder, but ironically, there wasn’t much chemistry there to me? Pryor didn’t seem as interested in playing off of Wilder as he was exploring this terrain on his own. In a scene with his lawyers, Wilder says, “People see movies about prison life, but until you’ve spent some time here, it’s hard to get the real flavor of what it’s like.” Maybe Pryor felt that Wilder didn’t get the flavor, didn’t understand that all of this—on some level deep beneath this one—maybe wasn’t as funny as it was made out to be.
Image: Columbia Pictures
