It is awfully sad when a film cast as its lead somebody only because they are the relative of a famous actor. Consider the pathetic Operation Kid Brother from 1967, which is one of the very few pictures to star Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil. I thought about that feature a great many times while watching 1985’s Moving Violations, which stars John Murray (brother of Bill) and James Keach (brother of Stacy).
Murray doesn’t fail horribly, but it is like getting Jim Belushi in a movie when you thought his brother John was in it. This is a performance that perfectly illustrates the difference between somebody playing a smartass you’re rooting for, versus the kind of smartass you want to see get his comeuppance.
His nemesis is a draconian traffic officer played by Keach. He fares better than Murray but then, as in most comedies, the straight man tends to get most of the laughs. He also somehow maintains some sort of dignity when subjected to such humiliations as pissing his pants or running through the streets of L.A. while in bondage wear.
I feel I need to bring up something here I otherwise might not be able to work in, and that is how weird it is that the film is unmistakably shot in Los Angeles, yet the film goes to such great pains to make this appear to be somewhere other than that city. Heck, the film is even shy about which state this is, as all signage declares this to be “Birch County”. Despite the name, this must be more than a mere county, as it appears on license plates where the state name would normally be located.
Keach and fellow officer (and love interest) Lisa Hart Carroll gleefully issue citations for assorted vehicular shenanigans. A judge played by Sally Kellerman then revokes the licenses for the everybody in the ragtag group of various oddballs who were cited for traffic violations. They are all sentenced to traffic school for a week. Those who fail the class will have their driving privileges permanently revoked and their vehicles will be sold at auction.
That seemed a bit extreme to me, but Kellerman’s reason for this is because she is taking a big cut of those sales. Seems to me somebody would have noticed this but, hey, this is an 80’s comedy in the mold of Police Academy. I’m not sure I continued watching that series past the second installment, but I remember the first one had some solid laughs in it. Similar to that film, I laughed at least a half dozen times in this, and was immediately embarrassed after most of those occasions.
As much as I disliked Murray in this, the first time I laughed in this was when Murray accidentally hands Keach a different item than the driver’s license he was told to surrender: “Oh, that’s my membership card for the Communist party. I only joined for the softball team.” Wendie Jo Sperber is stuck in a horrible subplot about her hypochondria, but I liked it when she says, “How can I be a hypochondriac when I’m sick all the time!”
Most of the humor is sight gags that trying to describe in writing would be an exercise in futility. And yet, I will try to convey the humor in a gag where a runaway bowling ball takes out of group of people waiting for the bus. Each person actually flies into the air on collision, while we hear the sound of a ball plowing through pins. The incident that landed Brian Backer in court is too complicated to describe, but he is telling the truth when he says, “I hit a casket with a puppet stage. What am I doing here?” What is even weirder is why Nadine Van der Velde attends the traffic school, as she is an underage driver using a fake ID. Since the only info the cops have on her is inaccurate, why go through this ruse? It’s like doing somebody else’s jail sentence.
Like so many comedies of the 80’s, this has many elements which carbon date it to that decade. First, it is completely sex-obsessed, including a sex scene in a zero-gravity chamber where hair still conveniently observes the laws of gravity. The obligatory obscure celebrity camera is courtesy of Clara Peller, likely at roughly 14 minutes and 58 seconds of the 15 minutes of fame she earned from doing those Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” commercials. Lastly, the music is terrible, particularly a strange bastardization of James Brown’s “I Feel Good” by somebody who must deeply hate that song.
I enjoyed Moving Violations more than I thought possible, though I would be hard-pressed to recommend this to anybody. The worst aspect of the film is its star, such as when he declares, “Driver, take me to the nearest nuclear power plant. My pants are full of uranium.” Everybody laughs, and I had no idea why. On the other hand, there were little moments with minor characters that made me laugh, such as using a legally blind old woman as a lookout: “Did you see anybody?” “I don’t know.”
Dir: Neal Israel
Starring John Murray, Jennifer Tilly, James Keach
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray