1985’s crime comedy Big Trouble is not an adaptation of Dave Barry’s novel of the same name.  In fact, I’m less sure of what it is or, at least, what it aspires to be.

Perhaps the thing I least expected it to be is a picture directed by John Cassavetes.  It is a sad way to end a career, even if he was simply a replacement for original director Andrew Bergman. 

I assume Cassavetes was hired as a favor for friend Peter Falk, as these two worked together on several features.  Cassavetes even did a guest spot on an episode of Columbo. 

The plot could have been interesting.  Falk is a schemer who comes up with a life insurance scam right out of the Double Indemnity playbook.  Then he takes it one step further, attempting to cash in on his own life insurance policy by substituting the corpse of a homeless man for his own.  I don’t think it was ever revealed how that corpse managed to have its face mangled beyond recognition. 

In fact, there is a great deal which isn’t explained.  It also feels like there are characters and subplots the film just abandons but, honestly, I was so bored at one point that I didn’t care to pay closer attention.  The accumulated inanity completely wore me out.  I will concede it is superficially clever to have a heist in a seemingly empty house actually be a place where a large group of people were waiting in the dark for the guest to arrive for a surprise birthday party.  The problem is this is just another series of seemingly unrelated things.  By the end of it, terrorists are incorporated into the plot and I had no reaction.  It could have introduced Bigfoot, the rapture, the Illuminati and Amelia Earhart and I wouldn’t have blinked.

Alan Arkin plays the insurance agent roped into the scam.  He needs money to send his triplet teenage sons to Yale, per the insistence of his wife (Valerie Curtin).  All three sons are aspiring classical music composers, and I wonder if there was a job market for that particular skill even back then.  Since they couldn’t get scholarships, Arkin will be out $14,000 a year to send all three to Yale, an amount so small today that I did a spit-take without actually having drank anything.  I also hope his musically prodigious progeny didn’t compose the parts of this score which is horrible, jazzy yacht rock, complete with slap bass.

He can’t even convince Robert Stack, a Yale grad and the head of the insurance company for which he works, to put in a good word with the scholarship committee for his sons.  Stack’s office is something else.  Behind a hidden panel is a heavily staffed security office, and I couldn’t help but wonder if those employees had to cut through his office each time they left, or returned to, their station.  That would be awkward.

Then there’s a vault at the end of that office, and this is where Stack keeps a great deal of priceless, gilded crap, for purposes which elude even him.  Why he doesn’t just keep that at home with such possessions as his statue by Michelangelo is beyond me. 

Also in the office is Charles Durning, a fraud investigator who marvels that Arkin managed to sell to Falk the worst policy the company has.  This life insurance will pay out for falling off a train but not for death in an airplane crash.  Then, when Falk’s wife (Beverly D’Angelo) arrives to collect after her husband supposedly died in the manner covered by the policy, Falk is there in a bald cap under the ruse of being her lawyer.  Even though this movie borders on farce, I still refuse to believe Durning didn’t perceive this alleged lawyer is clearly wearing a prosthetic. 

Speaking of which, at least he isn’t fooled when the still-living Falk pretends to be the corpse after the coroner has done a facial reconstruction job on it.  The corrupt doctor pretending to be a mortician even goes a step too far by claiming the nose was recreated by using the head of the penis.  Please don’t tell me this is where Dan Ackroyd got the idea for the dick-nose prosthetic for his murderous judge character in Nothing but Trouble.

When I say the movie walks the line of farce, that’s not to say there aren’t some solid laughs.  While I don’t believe anybody would actually have a “sardine liquor” such as Falk does, Arkin’s long series of spits after taking a swig is very funny.  Some of the beverage even ends up in a wicker box on the table.  Some other jokes reference noir and the tropes of that genre.  A scene between Arkin and D’Angelo in a drug store clearly references the grocery store scene in Double Indemnity. 

Alas, the laughs become increasingly sparse as the contrivances and seeming improvisations spiral out of control.  Without any inside information concerning the shoot, it is impossible to say what was originally scripted and what the film was like before the change in directors.  I don’t feel like doing an autopsy on the picture, but let’s just say it is a Frankenstein monster that is not only not the sum of the parts, but many of those parts were subpar even on their own.  To use as an analogy the earlier bit about Falk’s allegedly reconstituted face, Big Trouble is a corpse where they used the naughty bits of many corpses, some of which might not even be human, and made a whole-body abomination from those.

Dir: John Cassavetes

Starring Peter Falk, Alan Arkin, Beverly D’Angelo, Charles Durning

Watched as part of Mill Creek’s blu-ray set Peter Falk 4-Comedy Collection