Stir Crazy (1980)

Directed by Sidney Poitier. Starring Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, JoBeth Williams, Georg Stanford Brown, Joel Brooks, Miguel Ángel Suárez, Barry Corbin, Craig T. Nelson, Charles Weldon, Nicolas Coster, Jonathan Banks, Franklin Ajaye, Erland Van Lidth. [R]

Wilder and Pryor, whose pairing was the highlight of Silver Streak, team up again in this broad, untidy comedy about a couple of pals, one a struggling playwright and the other a struggling actor, who decide to head west to California and build up a nest egg doing odd jobs on their way. One such job leads to them being mistaken for bank robbers, and they get sent to a maximum security prison to serve 125-year sentences. Periodically very funny in the early-going, with memorable scenes of Pryor discovering that his marijuana stash has been used to “spice up” a hoity-toity dinner party, Wilder reacting in strangled disbelief at the trial verdict, and the two of them “being bad” at lock-up. But not long after they arrive at prison, the laughs come fewer and further between, and the film starts dragging with appeal process scenes, a tepid romance between Wilder and Williams (his lawyer’s partner), and an overlong finale set at a prison rodeo. The stars are fun together, though Pryor seems curiously neutered some of the time, while Wilder eschews his usual mild-mannered meekness for some aggressively animated moments (and not just when the camera shows him riding a bull for the hundredth time). Later turned into a short-lived television show.

56/100