I found this interesting from an historical perspective. I like the 1960s clothing fashion - women in bright orange and lime green dresses, and the bank scenes are filmed at the Manufacturers Trust Bank, a 1954 glass masterpiece of architecture by Gordon Bunscaft. The film shows the bank as a bank as it looked at the time - it is now a protected building and re-purposed as a Joe Fresh clothing store on 5th and 43rd. The beautiful bronze Bertoia screen is still there and it is great to see all the scenes in this movie to see what it would have been like when it functioned as a bank. Nice cars and street scenes on New York City and Central Park at the time. I also spotted some Marimekko fabric in Angie Dickinson's store. On the cross country trip, Dick Van Dyke and his mistress stop in Wapokeneta, Ohio. No reason this would be on a drive to Las Vegas from New York. So therefore I must conclude the only reason it was used is because it is astronaut Neil Armstrong's home town - and the first moon landing would have been during or just before filming. Also has a lot of familiar character actors that appeared in 1970s TV shows. So this movie is a nice way to see some 60s atmosphere, though the plot drags on toward the end.
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studioglk20 August 2016
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An obscure comedy that bombed in movie theaters in 1969, SOME KIND OF A NUT follows the plight of Fred Amidon (Dick Van Dyke), a Manhattan bank teller caught up in a divorce from Rachel (Angie Dickinson) while planning a future with a new fiancée, Pamela (Rosemary Forsyth). The movie opens with Fred and Pamela picnicking in Central Park and encountering a bee that stings Fred on the chin. Fred grows a beard to cover the bee sting, which his boss objects to and demands that he shave it off. Fred refuses, taking a stand after a lifetime of conforming to other people's demands. After he is fired, co-workers go on strike and Fred is soon joined by hippies and jazz musicians with beards. Garson Kanin's very lightweight "anti-Establishment " comedy begins well but quickly wanes with its one-joke plot, descending into mediocre slapstick despite a few zany comedic moments. SOME KIND OF A NUT suffers from a badly miscast Dick Van Dyke, who often defaults to his broad brand of physical comedy when a more low-key approach was clearly needed. Angie Dickinson is totally wasted here, while Rosemary Forsyth does what she can with an unsympathetic character. Much of the intended hilarity falls flat, as in scenes when Pamela's brothers attempt to shave off Fred's beard. Only Zohra Lambert hits a proper note of goofiness as an overage "hippie" enamored of Fred's cause for independence from traditional values.
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rwint23 June 2001Zany far out satire about a man who is fired from his job when he grows a beard to cover up a bee sting. Thus begins a long line of wacky characters, wild camera angles and situations. Has a few funny moments to keep this from being the complete bomb all the other critics say it is. Best part comes when in a show of solidarity all the co-workers begin to wear fake beards, even the women! Angie Dickinson helps the scenary and Johnny Mandel gives a very bouncy score.
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It is obvious that Van Dyke was begging his agent to get him something different to prove that he could play a lead character that was unlikable. He must've admired his friend Andy Griffith's bravura performance in "A Face In The Crowd" very much. Friend Carl Reiner directed him in the overlooked gem, "The Comic" in 1968. Van Dyke and the script were perfect, but the movie bombed, thus threatening to pigeonhole him more than ever in Disney-ish tripe. Mind you, I'm just extrapolating from the facts I know, but it sure seems that Van Dyke was a desperate man when he agreed to star in this uneven amalgamation of nihilist farce, cultural satire, and moralistic claptrap. And Van Dyke seemed determined to force the darkest side of his unreasonably unlikable and self-destructive character down the audience's throat. I found it very hard to take in the theaters as an adolescent, but recently watched it on tape to see if I felt the same way as an adult. Not quite. As an adult, I found it a fascinating time capsule but otherwise, an all-too-annoying and impossible attempt to capture the essence of theater d'absurd with American TV actors, then compounding its own futility by eventually copping out on its only reason to exist.
Avoid this mess unless you are doing a film studies paper. -
mrb198025 November 2015After "Mary Poppins", Dick Van Dyke had a pretty mediocre career in movies. It wasn't that he wasn't funny or couldn't act, the roles and scripts he selected were just so bad. "Some Kind of a Nut" is probably his worst effort, which is saying a lot since he made so many terrible films.
Fred Amidon (Van Dyke) is a staid executive at a conservative corporation. One day (after a really laughless struggle) he's stung on the chin by a bee and develops a rash. Because it hurts him to shave, Amidon grows a beard, which is taboo in the 1969 corporate world. He's fired for not shaving, then embarks a disjointed, unfunny self-discovery journey until he reunites with his wife (Angie Dickinson) and all is well.
I have a theory about movies from 1969. It was the year of counterculture and great change in American society, and I think a lot of movies from that year strained to be "different" to reflect the changes in our culture. Sometimes it worked ("Midnight Cowboy" and "Easy Rider", for example) but a lot of times, like this film, it failed miserably. Van Dyke tried to be funny in his role, but it didn't work at all. Watch at your own peril. -
ericdane-hampton15 January 2014This movie was absolutely horrible. It wasn't funny, it didn't provide any sort of inner truth or good vs bad, it offered nothing. I kept watching the movie hoping that at some point there would be a meaning or some merit to the movie but it never delivered. It was 90 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. I'm rarely critical of movies, but this movie is one to avoid. After I finished watching the movie I couldn't believe that someone in the movie industry in 1969 thought this was good enough to release...let alone a worthwhile project to even film. The ball buster for me was the very end of the movie. He leaves the mental ward with his girlfriend, but ends up with his ex-wife because she all of a sudden admired him for growing his beard and standing up. Implausible plot from start to finish. Did the movie producers try for some sort of "zany" film relying on Dick Van Dyke? In any event it didn't work.
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FlushingCaps25 January 2013I have to begin by saying I couldn't finish watching this disaster of a film. As a huge Dick Van Dyke fan, I saw a listing and recorded it overnight this week and watched most of it this evening.
But it was so dreadful neither my wife nor I could stand to continue wasting our time.
It starts with the camera following a bee zipping through New York and into Central Park, where it annoys several characters in the film while the buzzing sound annoys anyone watching the movie.
Finally, it seemed, the bee settled down and started to land on various places on Van Dyke and his girlfriend, who were lounging on a blanket in the park while on their lunch hour from work. They had several opportunities to kill the bee, but just chose to do the stupidest things to try to get him to fly away.
Some of these got the attention of two young women, who, apparently were some sort of Central Park police looking for people getting too chummy with each other, so they could call in a regular policeman and issue a ticket to the offender.
Over and over, the couple chased the bee off themselves, only to have him reappear. Both of us were thinking if they don't get off this bee kick soon, we're going to give up watching really early in the film.
Alas, when they finally got the bee to sting one of themselves, and got a ticket from those "police officers", the movie then stopped tumbling downhill. It went over the cliff. What troubled me the most, other than the total lack of anything funny being said or happening at all, is that there seemed to be no point to the actions of any of the leading characters.
Van Dyke got criticized at work for having a band aid on his chin, because the band aid was too big. Next, he and his girlfriend go on a car trip. We see brief scenes supposedly in Ohio, then San Francisco, then Las Vegas, then Hollywood, then back to New York. Along the way he decides, for no particular reason, to grow a beard.
The beard becomes a huge issue, before he gets back to work, and even bigger when he does. Even though he's getting married soon, and says he plans to shave it by his wedding date, he refuses to consider shaving it any earlier, despite all the problems it causes him.
I think he was truly a Rebel Without a Cause. He didn't really care about having the beard, didn't want to keep it, admitted he just grew it because the bee sting made shaving difficult, but was willing to jump into controversy instead of just shaving it off, like his fiancée wanted him to.
Through all of this, we are given no reason to care anything about the characters.
I forgot to mention that several times, his fiancée and other women he encounters, such as a belly dancer, each suddenly to into his ex-wife nagging him about something. That is where Angie Dickinson comes in. A bunch of one-line scenes that seem surreal.
If that's not enough to convince you to turn on ANY other film or TV show instead of wasting your time with this nonsense, then I suggest you give it a try and maybe you'll stick it out long enough to see the part I didn't choose to see.
I chuckled once, but cannot remember what it was.
It is almost never that I rate a film a one (or a 10), but that loud bee buzzing sound that dominated the first ten minutes, coupled with a totally pointless plot for about an hour made me give it the score of one. It's hard to argue that it had anything worth seeing. -
DKosty12319 August 2016I like the people in this movie. Dick Van Dyke never seems to have gotten anywhere here though. Angie Dickinson look good but seems a little wasted in this. David Doyle who would go on to fame in Charlies Angels is another player here with little to do.
This is a case where Garson Kanin appears to try to utilize Van Dykes potential to do physical comedy, but fails to write a coherent script to give the viewer any reason to watch this stuff. Heywood Hale Broun is smart enough to appear as himself so he can not take any blame for this.
I really do not understand how so many talented people could get together and make a bomb like this one. Part of it could be Garson Kanin's Direction as there seems to be no flow here. I am really at a loss to figure what happened, though a lot of men who remember Angie must envy Van Dyke getting a chance to do suggestive physical comedy with her in one sequence.
The trouble is that is the highlight of this movie. -
This is really an awful film. In 1968, Garson Kanin was very highly regarded - most famously, he wrote "Born Yesterday" - but this was the first film he had directed since "Tom, Dick and Harry" in 1941 (this film was started before Kanin's second film of the year "Where It's At" in the spring of 1968, but was halted in mid-production, and was finished after the latter film) and the results were a disaster. The script sucks and Van Dyke is thoroughly obnoxious and unlikeable in the lead. About the only positive thing I can say about the film is the presence of the two beautiful blonde female leads - the sexy Angie Dickinson and the classy, elegant Rosemary Forsyth.
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mark.waltz21 July 2023Without a doubt one of the unfunniest and most depressingly hideous farces ever made. It's probably the film that if he wanted to, Dick Van Dyke would ask his fans not to watch, the venom worse from the idiocy of the script than bee sting that causes the whole plotline to unfold in one of the longest and most ridiculously annoying openings in film history. The bee flies all over Central Park, being shooed away, and finally choosing Dick for its victim. I'd rather deal with the bee than the women he's involved with from the top billed but barely used Angie Dickinson as the ex-wife to Rosemary Forsythe as the current girlfriend who nags like a wife of two decades to the trail of 60's "modern women" who are supposed to be smart and independent and just come off as loud and shrill.
Then there's practically every other character that passes through Van Dyke's life, all a bunch of ridiculous blowhards, a list that he finally joins when his fight against the bank that fired him because of his beard gets public attention. Director and screenwriter Garson Kanin, desperately seeking to be hip and cool, fails miserably, showing that not all the great talents could adapt as tastes changed. The issue of his beard upsetting so many people comes off forced, and as a parody of the fight against conformity, this is a bigger groaner than the slew of Jerry Lewis movies that cursed movie theaters around the same time. Definitely a rotten nut, and cuckoo, not cocoa. -
Wizard-82 September 2016To date, "Some Kind of a Nut" has never received an official home video release despite starring Dick Van Dyke and Angie Dickinson. You'll have to wait for one of its occasional airings on cable if you want to see it. And once you do, you'll will see you could have easily waited a lot longer. Certainly, this movie commits the ultimate sin that a comedy can make, that being that it isn't very funny. In fact, it's not funny at all at any moment. But just as big a problem is the fact that the movie doesn't seem sure what to do with its premise. The premise itself - Van Dyke getting into hot water from growing a beard - is certainly unbelievable even for 1969, but the movie doesn't know what to do once that happens. The plot comes to a near standstill, and the actors desperately mug in front of the camera maybe in the hope that their wacky behavior will mask the fact that there really isn't all that much plot. It doesn't work. It's sub par theatrical efforts like this that explain why Van Dyke soon drifted back to working primarily in television.