Fitzwilly (The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Man Who Came to Dinner TCM showed another Christmas-themed farce, Fitzwilly, which according to imdb.com was released in 1967 but I remember seeing it in a theatre as late as 1969. It starred two great character comedians who at the time were best known for their TV work: Dick Van Dyke, who’d just wrapped up the TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show after five successful seasons (he could have kept it going but he wanted to do other things with his career); and Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 on the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry spoof of James Bond, Get Smart! Van Dyke played Claude Fitzwilliam, nicknamed “Fitzwilly,” butler to Miss Victoria Woodworth (the legendary British actress Dame Edith Evans, who’s a sheer delight in the role). Ten years previously, Victoria’s father died suddenly with less than $200 to his name after a life in which he’d made and squandered millions. To conceal the fact that she’s broke, Fitzwilly created an elaborate set of criminal enterprises to earn her the money she thought she still had, channeling the proceeds through a fake charity called St. Dismas Thrift Shoppe in Pennsylvania (the main action takes place in New York City, and the real St. Dismas was supposedly the “Good Thief” crucified alongside Jesus and the patron saint of reformed crooks in general). They also pull some scams that are Biblically related but not necessarily illegal, including sending embossed copies of the Bible to people who’ve recently lost loved ones (whose names they get from perusing the obituary columns) and starting bets in bars over the story of Samson and Delilah. The gimmick is that they ask people to place bets on whether Delilah cut off Samson’s strength-giving hair himself or she got a Philistine soldier to do it. The latter is correct, something I vividly remember because one afternoon my husband Charles came home while our then-roommate and home-care client John Primavera was watching the 1949 film Samson and Delilah. Charles saw Hedy Lamarr as Delilah personally cutting the hair of Victor Mature as Samson and said, “That’s not how it was in the book!”

The action kicks off when Fitzwilly has to deal with Juliet Nowell (Barbara Feldon), who’s been sent over by a college employment office for a job as secretary to Miss Victoria Woodworth on her mega-project to write a dictionary for the functionally illiterate. Victoria’s idea is to write a dictionary listing the most common wrong spellings of words and then give the correct one. There’s a charming bit in which Victoria denounces the sheer number of English words that begin with a silent “p.” Fitzwilly has shopped her idea to potential publishers, who turned it down on the grounds that people who are illiterate don’t buy dictionaries, but she’s studded it with enough of her autobiography that when Juliet discusses it with her father (Harry Townes), a medieval English literature professor at Columbia University, he agrees to show it to an editor he knows that’s also a whiz at Scrabble. Fitzwilly doesn’t want Juliet on the job at the Woodworth home because she might stumble onto their criminal activities; he’s already lined up a “safe” candidate for the secretarial gig, but Juliet essentially dares him to hire her – and he does. Eventually Juliet catches on to the scheme after Fitzwilly takes her on a date – he’s hoping she’ll resent her employer coming on to her and quit, but instead she falls genuinely in love with him, and vice versa – and Fitzwilly decides on the proverbial Last Big Score, a Christmas-eve robbery at Gimbel’s. (It’s a measure of how differently the world worked in 1967 than it does today that the crooks in this film can assume there’ll be a huge amount of cash on the Gimbel’s premises ripe for stealing on Christmas eve. Today virtually everybody pays with credit or debit cards.)

The robbery scheme goes off except that one of Fitzwilly’s key henchmen, a former minister named Albert (John McGiver), gets caught and demands to confess all his crimes. Ultimately Victoria offers to pay off the $190,000 Gimbel’s lost in the robbery, and when Fitzwilly questions whether she can afford it without dipping into her (nonexistent) capital, Victoria announces that she’s received $500,000 in advances and a movie-rights payment for her dictionary. This will cover not only the money Gimbel’s lost but also the losses scared interior designer Byron Casey (Stephen Strimbell) suffered from being scammed by the gang in connection with a home he was supposed to be redecorating for a couple in Florida who came home unexpectedly. Ably directed by Delbert Mann from a script by Funny Girl author Isobel Lennart based on a novel called A Garden of Cucumbers by John Poyntz Tyler (whose day job was as an Episcopal minister and bishop in North Dakota, which may explain how much of the plot is rooted in religion), Fitzwilly is a splendid farce that holds up surprisingly well. It’s also one of those films that features quite a few people who became famous names in later years. One of the members of Fitzwilly’s gang, Claude, is played by the young but still recognizable Sam Waterston (later he’d play on the right side of the law as assistant district attorney Jack McCoy on Law and Order, which also featured Jerry Orbach, another actor who’d got his start in 1950’s movies on the wrong side of the law as a juvenile delinquent in films based on Ed McBain’s crime novels before ending up as the lead detective on Law and Order). Also in the cast are Norman Fell as a Gimbel’s security person (he's actually billed ahead of Waterston even though he has less screen time) and John Fielder as an executive with the Steinway piano company who recognizes Fitzwilly at Gimbel’s as the man who scammed him out of a grand piano for the Florida decorating job. An even more illustrious name wrote the musical score for this film; he’s billed here as “Johnny Williams” but he’s really John Williams, the most honored film composer in movie history (he’s won the Academy Award for Best Original Score five times). Williams not only wrote a suitably bouncy score but also contributed a song, “Make Me Rainbows,” with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, which is heard sung by a chorus as Fitzwilly and Juliet have their first date.