Stir Crazy starts in New York City as best friends Skip Donahue (Gene Wilder) & Harry Monroe (Richard Pryor) are both fired from their jobs on the same afternoon, drowning their sorrows in a local bar Skip tells Harry that he is fed up with New York & convinces his friend that they should set off on a road trip across the US to Hollywood to find their fame & fortune. Harry agrees but their old van breaks down in a small town called Glenboro, needing money to pay for the repairs Skip & Harry are hired by a bank to sing a song dressed as Woodpeckers. Two local crooks steal the Woodpecker costumes & rob the bank for which Skip & Harry are blamed, they go before a judge, found guilty & sentenced to one hundred & twenty five years each behind bars in state prison. Both Skip & Harry are unprepared for the harsh reality of prison & decide to use the upcoming rodeo to escape...
Directed by Sidney Poitier this is the sort of film that you will get & roll around on the floor laughing or find crude & unfunny, comedy like so much else is subjective & what makes one person laugh will not necessarily make the guy sitting next to him laugh so when I say that I thought Stir Crazy was often quite hilarious it's only my own personal opinion as I know quite rightly the person I was standing next to in the que at the bus stop may not. Simple. I won't say that you will find Stir Crazy as funny as I did but I think you would need to be pretty devoid of emotion not to find at least some of it amusing & as I said I think it's often outright hilarious. The film starts off almost entirely as a showcase for the comedic pairing of Wilder & Pryor with some terrific scenes including the Woodpecker dance, the 'I'm bad' scene in jail, some priceless one-liners & reactions to the general likability of the two leads as they turn the material into gold. However once the rodeo aspect & jail break angle kicks in during the second half of the film the comedy seems to take a back seat as gambling, cheating & an odd jail break (why did Harry have to go back into the rodeo? Why couldn't Rory & Jesus climb up the shaft & into the popcorn thing like Harry & Skip do?) take center stage. Also the ending is a little silly & unsatisfying in it's attempt to finish as quickly as possible, sure Harry & Skip have been acquitted but that still leaves the fact they broke out of jail & helped two other convicted criminals including a murderer to escape too. While I am poking holes in the plot would a lawyer's niece really get a job in a topless bar just on the off chance she might see a guy with a particular tattoo? Now that's going above & beyond the call of duty, unless of course she needed the extra money as well.
Shot in a real Arizona prison this has good production values & is well made for what it is although there's no real action apart from some rodeo footage of horses & bulls thrashing around. While there is plenty of bad language & profanity there's no violence to speak of. Apparently Richard Pryor refused to wear the Woodpecker suit while filming but strangely did wear for the poster & promotional materials.
Apparently a big success at the time even though the critics generally hated it, some of the country & western style music & songs are a little nerve grating & distracting but nothing too major. The acting is good, Wilder & Pryor in particular are brilliant here as a pairing & it's said a lot of scenes were improvised between the two. Even though their character's never meet in Stir Crazy both JoBeth Williams & Craig T. Nelson went on to star in the excellent Poltergeist (1982) a couple of years later.
Stir Crazy is a film that I found extremely funny, Wilder & Pryor are on top form & while the logistic's of the story seem to have been shoved to one side Stir Crazy is just a film to be enjoyed & not taken too seriously.
4 out of 5 found this helpful