The Toy (1982)

Directed by Richard Donner. Starring Richard Pryor, Jackie Gleason, Scott Schwartz, Ned Beatty, Teresa Ganzel, Annazette Chase, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Tony King. [PG]

American version of French comedy Le Jouet takes an already tacky idea and turns it into a scenario of irredeemable bad taste. Pryor plays a recently-fired department store janitor who’s “purchased” to be the plaything of the spoiled but neglected son of the store’s rich owner (Gleason). Now, any premise can be saved by the marriage of intent and execution, but there’s no satirical or deconstructionist angle here—it’s a brain-dead farce that turns into feel-good pap at the end. The supporting characters are all one-dimensional, Gleason is wasted as an arrogant blowhard without anything clever to say or do, and Pryor is stunningly unfunny playing a cartoon character (e.g., a piranha attack causes him to literally run on water). Even if society was color blind, it’s too hard to get past the racial insinuations of the situation; how else to explain why the protagonist is constantly being referred to as the “black man” or why, during the scene when Pryor learns he’s being purchased for “ownership”, there’s a prominent Confederate flag past his shoulder? The great comic talent that was Richard Pryor had more turkeys than triumphs in his film career, and this is almost certainly the nadir.

7/100