I would really like to have seen how the people who made 'Folks!' managed to convince each other that this was a good idea. I looked for one of those 'Making Of' specials to hear the cast and crew try to explain themselves but suspiciously there wasn't one. How did they sit through screen writing sessions without somebody speaking up and questioning the morality of jokes about a man with Alzheimer's Disease? How did they convince Tom Selleck to play a role that requires his character to lose a toe, an ear, an eye and a testicle? How did they sit through the cast and crew screening without somebody speaking up about what a wretched idea this was? Maybe no one wanted to lose his or her job but it was no consequence to anyone that the studio would lose money.
I'm a defender of the idea that nearly anything can be made funny with the tenderest of care, however Alzheimer's Disease is a subject that would probably need more caution then most. Ted Kotcheff directs 'Folks!' with wild abandon and that's his first mistake.
Tom Selleck is woefully miscast as a New York stockbroker with a lovely wife and wonderful kids and a mother and father who are getting along in years. He goes to Florida when his mother needs surgery because she's worried about leaving Dad all alone. Dad (Don Ameche) has contracted Alzheimer's disease and wanders around like Mr. Magoo ambling around with a goofy smile and completely impervious to the chaos around him.
Selleck belatedly figures out that there is something wrong and lets him drive the Cadillac which promptly gets backed into the lake. After that Dad burns down their trailer home naturally Selleck has to give them a place to live. This is an excuse for a long series of cruel jokes in which Dad gets son into one accident after another each more painful then the last.
The most inexplicable scene comes when the parents offer to commit suicide by filling their car with gasoline so he can set them on fire so that he can collect the insurance money. That scene even in the hands of the best screenwriter would be impossible to make funny.
There are three dozen different wrong decisions that went into the making of 'folks!' not the least of which is the miscasting of Tom Selleck. Selleck is such a down-to-earth actor, such nice guy on 'Magnum P.I.' and in films like 'Three Men and a Baby' and 'Quigley Down Under' that it makes me cringes to watch him playing a creep getting knocked around like a pinball. Ditto Don Ameche whom I've admired as a smart actor in his early films and in his later career in films like 'Cocoon'. I would really like to know how they talked him into playing this role.
What on earth made anyone think that this was a good idea? I could probably argue that this might have worked as an extremely black comedy. Just to add another point, this movie was released just after the terrible accident in New York in which an elderly man was killed in a car accident so you can see that even the time for release was bad.
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