Fun with Dick and Jane (Columbia, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I decided to watch a couple of movies on Turner Classic Movies, which this month is doing their usual August “Summer Under the Stars” tribute. For this they tear up their normal schedule and show the films of a single actor all day, changing the actor each day. Yesterday the actor they were paying tribute to was George Segal, who made some great films as well as some pretty awful ones (like the incredibly boring The Terminal Man, probably the worst movie adaptation ever of a Michael Crichton novel), and the two films of his I caught last night were both made in the 1970’s, both released by Columbia Pictures (albeit with the usual nominally “independent” co-production companies) and at opposite poles on the quality scale. The good one was Fun with Dick and Jane, a 1977 production casting Segal and Jane Fonda as Richard and Jane Harper. The film was inspired by the oft-ridiculed “Fun with Dick and Jane” grade-school textbooks used to teach postwar Baby Boomer kids to read (though by the time I entered grade school my mother had already taught me to read) that projected a white image of America in both the racial and the moral senses: two kids, “a good boy” named Dick and “a pretty girl” named Jane, grow up next to each other and play with a dog named Spot. For generations people have made fun of the insipidity of the text and the sing-songy nature of the prose (“See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!”), but the writers of this film – Gerald Gaiser (story) and David Giler (just coming off the massive failure of The Black Bird, which he both wrote and directed, a combination sequel to and spoof of The Maltese Falcon with Segal playing Sam Spade, Jr., son of Humphrey Bogart’s character in the original film, and Elisha Cook, Jr. and Lee Patrick repeating their roles as they had naturally aged; despite some typical 1970’s lapses into smut gags and a really stupid ending, The Black Bird is a monumentally underrated film and one of the better noir spoofs), Jerry Belson and Mordecai Richter, script – decided to extend the Dick and Jane story into then-contemporary adulthood.

Richard (Dick) Harper has become an engineer at Taft Aerospace and eventually risen to head his own department, while his wife Jane is a stay-at-home housewife who spends the day taking care of their son Billy (Sean Frye) and his dog, still named Spot (and a dead ringer for the little black-and-white dog of indeterminate breed from the original readers) while supervising contractors who are installing new landscaping and putting in a swimming pool. Then disaster strikes as Richard is suddenly the victim of a round of layoffs (the ghastly euphemisms “downsizing” and “rightsizing” had fortunately not been invented yet); he gets the first intimation when a worker is shown painting out a former executive’s name on the company’s parking-lot space. He shows up expecting to present his boss, Charlie Blanchard (Ed McMahon, stepping out from under Johnny Carson’s shadow and turning in a brilliant comedic character performance), to hear out his plan for reorganizing his department to cut costs without having to fire anybody. Instead he hears Blanchard give some alcoholic rambles about this business “stinks … on ice,” and then lower the ax on him and tell him he’s fired. It seems that ever since the U.S. put “Armstrong and – oh yeah, that other guy. What was his name again?” on the moon, orders for aerospace companies have dried up and the business has suffered major economic hits. Richard comes home to break the news to Jane, just as the swimming-pool contractors are there to overhear it and wonder whether they’re going to get paid – and then he has to tell his son, whose response is, “Are we going to be poor, like The Waltons?”

The first half of the film consists of the Harpers’ attempt to adjust to their new economic state while still maintaining the trappings of their old one, notably their house (in an exclusive suburban enclave) and their car. Richard rather haplessly searches for another job, only the search costs money because, as he explains to Jane (and us), the only way you can get a new job at his level is to put on a good (and expensive) front so it doesn’t look like you need one. Only his big dinner with a prospective employer, whom he’s invited over at home and blown whatever budget he had on steaks, is disrupted by a landscaping crew whose foreman comes with a bullhorn and demands admission so they can repossess their indoor plants. (He’s already repossessed their outdoor plants in a brilliant scene in which Jane says, “You’re using Gestapo tactics!” He replies, “That’s not possible. I’m Jewish!”) This blows Dick’s carefully constructed façade and he’s reduced to collecting unemployment – for which his guide is Raoul Esteban (Hank Garcia), who was a janitor at Taft and was canned in the same round of layoffs that caught Dick. He tells Dick to identify himself as an aerospace engineer, and when he protests that he isn’t one anymore, Raoul says, “In here [meaning the unemployment office], you are what you were!” Unfortunately, Dick sticks his foot in his mouth big-time when the person in front of him in the unemployment line is a Transwoman in full drag, who tells the clerk that she’s leaving soon to have “the operation – the operation,” and when Dick gets to the front of the line he starts making homophobic comments, thinking the clerk will sympathize. The clerk gives him the lecture – “For your information, he’s not a ‘fruit,’ he’s not a ‘fairy,’ he’s not even a homosexual. He is a woman trapped in a man’s body.” A modern writer pulling this gag would have been more careful about preferred gender pronouns and called her “she,” but for 1977 this is a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of being Transgender.

Later Raoul talks Dick into doing an under-the-table job with an opera company as a super – where his job, as we see it, consists mainly of hoisting the overweight star onto a table so she can sing the “Chanson bohème” from Carmen – only the clerk from the unemployment office is in the audience, recognizes him through his opera glasses, and ends up disqualifying him from unemployment for the next three years. So desperately broke that Dick and Jane can’t even afford to pay the electric bill – Billy is having to study by candlelight – they seek to borrow some money from Jane’s parents and instead get a self-righteous lecture from Jane’s dad (who has a picture of Ralph Waldo Emerson on his wall even though “self-reliance” seems to be the only concept of Emerson’s he’s ever heard of) about how falling so far and then picking themselves up could be the best thing that ever happened to them, and they should look on it as a growth opportunity. (Jane’s dad also gives himself credit for having seen the upcoming slump in aerospace and sold all his stock in aerosiace companies.) Desperate, they end up seeking whatever they can get from what would now be called a payday lender and get offered $1,000 per year at 18 ½ percent interest (“Isn’t that illegal?” Jane asks – it was then but it isn’t now, thanks to the whole mania for “deregulation” that began under Jimmy Carter, increased under Ronald Reagan and has been pursued by governments of both major parties ever since, the Republicans faster and more intensively than the Democrats).

Just then a bunch of Black robbers comes to hold up the place, and in the confusion Jane ends up grabbing $2,000 the robbers dropped when the police came and they had to flee. They have a brief moral debate as to whether they should return the money and then realize the way for them to bail themselves out financially is to become robbers themselves. (The film was sometimes called an updated spoof of Bonnie and Clyde and the two would have been even closer if Faye Dunaway, who was offered the part of Jane Harper and turned it down, had been cast.) After a few missteps – including a delightful scene when they try to rob a drugstore, only Richard drops the gun into his crotch and the old man at the counter interprets this as a sexual gesture and sells him $10 worth of condoms – they finally get the hang of it. The writers are sensible enough to aim their robberies at places we see as either disreputable or deserving of being ripped off; their first successful target is an X-rated motel. Then they stick up the famous Tower Records location in Hollywood (I remember Tower Records) and then hold up a telephone store – whose customers cheer them on because they hate the phone company so much they enjoy seeing it robbed. Their last caper on the open market is a robbery of a church service led by a Rev. Ike-style “prosperity gospel” evangelist named Dr. Will (a brief but hilarious role for Fred Willard) whose slogan is, “I am!” When he realizes what’s going on and that Dick and Jane are stealing his collections, he asks, “Are you robbing me?” and Dick dead-pans, “I am.” Then he gets out and chases his robbers and is in turn chased by the police, and in order to distract both the minister and the cops Dick and Jane throw the money out of their car and the people on the street madly dash for it (a scene obviously inspired by the end of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing).

Back home, Dick and Jane take stock of what they’ve accomplished in their crime spree and Dick is startled to realize their ill-gotten gains have all been spent on bringing their mortgage current and restoring their power, their garden and their pool. They decide to quit their career while they’re ahead – “I’m just not cut out for blue-collar crime!” Dick protests (even though from what we’ve seen he’s got pretty good at it following a shaky start) – until they see a televised Congressional hearing on corruption in the aerospace industry and Charlie Blanchard is up there swearing under oath that he never paid bribes or authorized anyone in his company to do so. Dick knows he’s lying – he’s seen the company safe filled with cash used for just that purpose – and so he and Jane plot to rob the Taft company safe and steal the at least $200,000 in bribe money contained there. They have their chance because Dick has been invited to a party at Taft, which features the introduction of a new satellite to the familiar opening strains of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra as heard in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (though played by a tacky hotel band “live” instead of heard on a recording of the original). Jane’s job is to play up to Charlie’s lecherous advances on her (if he’d been shown as hot to trot for her from the beginning and even offered to keep Richard Harper employed if he’d let Charlie sleep with her, this would be an even more mordant satire than it is – even so, with the lecherous boss who literally can’t keep his hands off any woman who crosses his path and feels a sort of droit de seigneur towards them, this was an unexpectedly timely movie to watch on the day New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation after his similar shenanigans were exposed in excruciating detail by the New York attorney general’s office) and pick his pocket for the keys to his office, and then Richard will go in with a drill to crack open the safe.

They pull off the robbery despite a group of Black blue-collar workers who are having their own party in Blanchard’s office, but as they try to get out with their persons and Jane’s purse loaded with cash, Blanchard catches them. Only Dick tells Blanchard that if he involves the police, Dick will have to tell them just what the money was, what it was used for and how he knew where it was – and Blanchard yields to the blackmail and lets Dick and Jane leave with the money. In a final credit that makes this movie an even nastier and more mordant satire on capitalism than it’s been before, we see a closing credit which reads, “BULLETIN, FEBRUARY 11, 1977 . . . THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF TAFT AEROSPACE ANNOUNCED TODAY THE APPOINTMENT OF RICHARD HARPER AS PRESIDENT, REPLACING CHARLES BLANCHARD WHO RESIGNED . . . THE BOARD PRAISED HARPER, 42, FOR DISPLAYING ‘THE IMAGINATION AND INGENUITY THAT HAS MADE AMERICAN INDUSTRY WHAT IT IS TODAY.’”

When Fun with Dick and Jane was first released, the hype surrounding it was that Jane Fonda had blessedly returned to normal commercial filmmaking with nonpolitical entertainment plots after her period of intense Left-wing activism in the early 1970’s – including her infamous ride on a North Viet Namese anti-aircraft gun that was aimed at U.S. bombers and her appearance in Leftist French director Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 film Tout Va Bien (“All Is Well”) – but Fun with Dick and Jane is, at least to me, as radical a film as any Jane Fonda ever made. Its whole point is capitalism and the way it chews out people and spits them out when they’re no longer useful for the profit margin, and though the proletarians don’t come off particularly well either (aside from Raoul, who’s at least lovable),the film’s main satirical barbs are against capitalism and the whole superstructure of hypocrisy that keeps people believing in it. Fun with Dick and Jane just sugar-coated the anti-capitalist message with some quite funny comedy, and even the self-consciously “mellow rock” theme song, “Ahead of the Game” by a group I haven’t otherwise heard of called The Movies (were they a real band, or just a few session singers and the Wrecking Crew?), at once exploits and lampoons the “we’re gonna get our piece of the cake” sentiments of the American “success” myth and the whole point of the story that these were people who thought they were “ahead of the game,” got thrown for a look and ended up behind it, then recovered, not by playing by the rules but by flouting them and taking advantage of the system’s fundamental immorality.