A potential pandemic has struck New York City. The government is encouraging the use of masks to help prevent infection. There’s talk of an Asian flu development in a lab over there. But this isn’t the COVID era we’re talking about. To my complete shock, these are elements of the 1968 comedy What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?
This is a benign virus, in my opinion. The primary impact is the carrier feels euphoria, making them stand out clearly against the film’s version of the city, which is populated entirely of stereotypes of the worst kind as imagined by outsiders. But it also makes the infected start caring more about their appearance. Worst of all for the economy, they stop drinking and smoking.
The people who experience the most radical change are the movie’s idea of hippies, though they’re really beatniks—which shows how much the filmmakers were out of step with the times. And, even taking that into consideration, these aren’t even close to being real beatniks, but more of a Mad Magazine idea of what such people were like. For example, there is much enthusiastic talk about the potential arrival of the next unemployment check.
Nobody would ever believe George Preppard and Mary Tyler Moore are nihilist artists living in squalor, yet here they are. They live with several others of a similar mindset in two apartments which manage to be quite disgusting even when they are obvious sets. One guy constantly reads aloud from the texts of a philosopher who I assume is supposed to be a Marxist. One woman stays covered in a bag, with only her feet exposed, which I hope inspired John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their “Bagism” phase. Jill St. John demonstrates she is awfully flexible, as she is always doing yoga. I found that odd, as everybody else is rather energetically cynical, while yoga is about finding calmness. It is the kind of thing which makes me want to throw the title of this picture back in the faces of the filmmakers. Then again, The Addams Family had Gomez always doing yoga, as if there is something sinister about it.
Admittedly, there are some pretty funny bits at this early stage of the runtime. Moore sings a dirge, of which one of her peers says, “The function of art is to reflect the misery of the world and that was a terrible song.” Moore takes this as praise. She also remarks of the recent stretch of clear skies, “You think there’d be a cloudy day every once in a while.” As a fan of grey days, I can relate to that.
Little to they know, but their lives are about to be upended by a toucan which had arrived on a Greek freighter. Why it is on the boat, I don’t know, but I guess it was supposed to be a joke riffing on the cliche of pirates having parrots. Anywho, it is patient zero for the disease, and Preppard, Moore, et al. are soon bathing, smiling enthusiastically, cleaning and redecorating, and just being obnoxiously happy. That the moment of their conversion is accompanied by a cartoon “SPROINGGG!!!” sound effect feels natural. That everybody already had clothes in bright, cheery colors had me deeply confused.
Preppard is the first to be infected, when the toucan flies in though the window, so as to eat some grapes that are lying around. The bird is awfully cute, and steals every scene its in. It doesn’t need the animated speech balloons provided for us to know its thoughts. I didn’t know toucans make a sound roughly like a purr, but it made it even more endearing.
Suddenly, Preppard has shaved off his beard, which somehow how the opposite effect of what that does for most men, making him look ten years older. He becomes determined to infect the others, with Moore proving to be the most difficult. At one point, he assumes the guise of being the European poet everybody was so enamored with, and he tries to strongarm her into sleeping with him. A sure sign you’re watching a major studio comedy of the late 60s trying to channel some of the counterculture is the hero trying to engage in various forms of sexual assault.
She’ll soon be swayed, regardless. This is unusual, as she will prove to have a natural immunity. I guess Preppard’s perky, rapey new persona was just that gosh darn powerful.
That there are those who are naturally immune is one of the discoveries made by government researchers deep in a bunker beneath the city. The head of the effort is Dom DeLuise, and I once again found him to be more amusing in early roles like this than most of the films for which he is best known.
At least his bits are better than many of the others in which his fellow actors appear. Moore fares the worst of them, especially in a deeply stupid extended gag where she hides the toucan under her jacket and pretends to be pregnant. This long set piece culminates with her in a hospital maternity ward, alarming a doctor who is confronted with something seemingly attempting to burst out of Moore’s chest. The only reason this isn’t a reference to Alien is because that film was still a decade in the future.
Even weirder than the setup for this gag is it illustrates an inconsistency with the film’s own logic. Another symptom of the virus is the infected are unable to tell a lie. Now, Moore isn’t infected, so I understand her ability to perpetuate the toucan ruse, but what about Preppard, who is infected and who puts her up to it?
What So Bad About Feeling Good? is a middling entertainment, one I doubt even won over most viewers in its time. I just wish the film had explored the step DeLuise would have undertaken if the number of infected exceeded three million. At that point, New York will be completely cutoff from the rest of the world, and I would have loved to have seen anybody try to prevent Snake Plisken from coming or going. I’m not sure what kind of mechanism they had in mind to restrict access but, as we recently discovered in real-life, all one has to do is implement a fee to enter Manhattan.
Dir: George Seaton
Starring George Preppard, Mary Tyler Moore, Dom DeLuise
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray