1971’s How to Frame a Figg was the last of the feature films Don Knotts starred in for Universal Pictures. He had an interesting run of five films for the studio, starting with The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which many regard as the best of the lot. I didn’t find any of these films to be gut-bustingly hilarious, but each had their moments.
The humor in each of these pictures is sitcom fare, which is the kind of material that suits Knotts well. Paradoxically, Figg is the closest of the bunch to what one would expect to see on TV of the time while also having the most potential for complexity. Alas, the script doesn’t explore many of the intelligent tangents it could explore, but it is still odd for a film marketed to kids to be so concerned about financial and government shenanigans. I wonder if young viewers of the time realized it’s a joke that a corrupt mayor is taking meeting minutes during a discussion of how to frame an accountant for the graft they’ve been committing.
Knotts is that patsy, the last remaining accountant at city hall after the three who are smarter than him are let go. Reviewing his school records before coming to this decision, there is concern he may not be dumb enough to fall for their scheme, as he had a B+ in mathematics. The low grades in other subjects allay any concerns, especially the reveal that he “dropped French because it hurt his sinuses.”
Inexplicably, they bought a computer to help with this job. This is back when computers were several racks of cryptic lights, buttons and switches. The inputs and outpust are punch cards and giant tape reels. One solid laugh the film got from me comes towards the end, when we see it exactly fits inside a coffin, in what makes for a bizarre sight gag.
Having access to a computer can only help Knotts uncover the crime. But he still never would have discovered it if his best friend (Frank Welker) hadn’t happened to stop by his office with the trash he had been collecting on his rounds as a sanitation employee. I was amused the shredder hadn’t been invented yet or, at least, small governments like this hadn’t realized yet they needed such a thing to cover their tracks.
To demonstrate how the machine works, Knotts grabs a random page from the trash and shows how fast it can tally the figures, except the correct tally doesn’t match what’s on the paper. The accountant presents his findings to the mayor (Edward Andrews), who successfully distracts Knotts with a promotion, a fancy office on the top floor of city hall and a scheming secretary (Yvonne Craig). The last is what makes Knotts’s girlfriend (Elaine Joyce) jealous.
Except for Barbara Rhoades in The Shakiest Gun in the West, none of the women in these features have much of a role. Joyce fairs the worst of any of them. Although pleasant enough, she is portrayed as being almost moronic. She and Knotts have an odd daily ritual where he flaps the pull-down shade in his office and she waves from the restaurant where she waits tables. Her boss has an eyebrow-raising reaction when she observes this: “Well, you better be on the pill.”
But Joyce may be a post-graduate college material compared to Welker. This is a man-child so stupid that I kept recalling the old insult where you ask a person if their mother had any children that lived. He seems to inexplicably have increased bursts of intelligence as the runtime progresses. I like how he keeps coming up with obscure old movie references that relate to whatever his friend’s plight is at the time.
I was surprised by how some of the lines in this film are of a more adult nature than Knott’s previous film, The Love God?, which cost him so of its audience with its mild innuendos. I mentioned that line about the pill earlier, and you probably could have had that on television at the time. But I doubt you’d hear something like how Parker Fennelly, as the town’s oldest and wealthiest man, reacts to Craig leveling her bosom to his face: “Don’t flash those at me, girly. I can’t get it up anymore.”
A line like that shows how crass How to Frame a Figg can be, though it is largely as gentle as the films Knotts made for Universal. Mostly, it shows the times were changing, with the market demanding cruder fare than that which suits the star best. As if signaling this would be the last such picture he would make, a scene towards the end has Knotts having an existential crisis while sitting in an open grave (admittedly, on top of a casket incongruously containing a mainframe computer). It’s an odd moment of revelation for the character he essentially played in all five of these films (and The Andy Griffith Show), as if Barney Fife had been dropped into a Beckett play. This is a bittersweet end to more innocent times.
Dir: Alan Rifkin
Starring Don Knotts, Elaine Joyce, Frank Welker
Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray set Don Knotts: Five Film Collection