I'll Never Forget Whatsisname: John Vernon, Page 4

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATSISNAME:
A TRIUTE TO CHARACTER ACTORS

JOHN VERNON, PAGE 4

HERBIE GOES BANANAS (1980)

"Where I come from, cars don't throw bananas!"

Do you remember where you were the day Herbie went bananas? It was a shocking and confusing time for us all; it wouldn't be exaggerating to say that, for my generation, that day marked the end of our innocence (Don Henley even wrote a song about it). So much more traumatizing than the day the Shaggy D.A. got rabies, or when Son of Flubber committed suicide.

What this is, for those who don't know, is one of those sappy, artless, outdated quick-buck live-action Disney comedies from the 60's and 70's, a'la The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, except that this one happened to spill over into the beginning of the 80's, like Condorman. The fourth or fifth entry in the Herbie series, the Cannonball Run of Disney comedies, this one has the love bug taking his anthropomorphic antics to the Federatic Republic of Brazil. I don't know why this particular venue was deemed suitable for this Beetle's brand of banana-themed bedlam: Stock Car Brasil would have only just started when the movie came out,* and Herbie's 20 years too early to get in on the rampant car craziness displayed in Fast Five. It made sense for him to go off to Monte Carlo with Don Knotts - they at least got the Formula One race track there. With no logistical reason for Herbie's hijinx to travel from Mexico (where the movie begins) down to South America, the whole set-up feels like a flimsy excuse to have the car wear a sombrero on the poster and send the Disney Live Action crew to beautiful, exotic Rio de Janeiro where, yes, they have some bananas.

Apparently at this point Dean Jones had left to go live with that darn cat, that ugly dachshund, that million dollar duck or that horse in the gray flannel suit (or all four - sorry, the barefoot executive ran off with Kurt Russell) so for a human hero in this Disney vehicle we're stuck with a precocious little Puerto Rican orphan pickpocket named Paco. Paco wears zapatos tenis and a baseball cap that looks like it came off a crew member right before shooting started when he's not indiscriminately lifting wallets from the pockets of alleged good guys and default villains alike. One such sneak results in the misappropriation of a film strip that somehow reveals the location of some kind of ancient Incan artifact (don't ask me to remember exactly what), making young Paco the target of a trio of dubious characters. Lucky for Paco he's adopted by Herbie, whom he lovingly dubs "Ocho" (5+3, get it?)** and together the boy and his car are pursued further south until the inevitable confrontation with the bad guys.

Disney was clearly trying to tap into Chaplin's The Kid territory - abandoned street kid befriended by mute protector - but the formula flops faster than Disney's The Kid.*** [Or the air goes out of its tires? Submit your own car analogy here.] Although I have to admit, I did not expect the bananas to be quite so literal. In fact, since I don't think anybody calls the car "Herbie" once throughout the movie, "bananas" is the most accurate part of the title. Whether being utilized by the love bug as a clever disguise or as projectile weapons, bananas abound in this fucking film - moreso than in your standard magical car movie I'm guessing. There may have been a papaya or an avocado appearance in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I honestly don't remember a single plátano popping up in the previous Herbie pictures.

Which isn't saying much - in fact the only scenes I remember from the original Love Bug are kind of upsetting: the hero (Dean Jones, the evil veterinarian from Beethoven) agrees to trade Herbie to the bad guy (David Tomlinson, the fuddy duddy dad from Mary Poppins) for a Lamborghini. This prompts Herbie, out of sheer pettiness, to destroy the new car and then attempt to hurl himself off the Golden Gate Bridge. Nothing evokes that Disney spirit like a murder-suicide, right? Yeesh. Bananas has its share of scary moments, including a scene where the car is forced to walk the plank (off a cruise ship that is apparently not magically alive). In an even more disturbing turn of events, a bunch of dirty vagrants approach Herbie with pickaxes and evil smirks, ready to smash him up just for the hell of it! With a kid in the driver's seat desperately trying to start the engine! Jesus! The unmotivated would-be car smashers are horrifying, they remind me of the mindless murderers from The Grapes of Death. Most cringe-worthy of all, the movie opens with Charles Martin Smith scoping out what turns out to be a pair of 14-year-olds...what kind of wholesome Disney fun is this?

I never really understood the basic concept behind Herbie the Love Bug. He keeps his sentience a secret from the general public, revealing himself only to lucky individuals such as Paco and Don Knotts, yet his antics only seem to cause trouble. In most of these movies there's a race involved, but Herbie is always being driven by the hero: does he have anything to do with winning? (Perhaps it's just important for a car to realize it's a race?) I forgot what specific magic powers he had in the first movie (except of course the magical power of suicidal inclination) - in this one, he uses his antenna like a hand to goose somebody (since he uses it as an appendage I guess I should technically be spelling it "antennae") and in an extended scene poses as a matador. So we know he's kinda sexist and has no qualms against animal cruelty...interesting. At one point, voo doo is suggested as the source of his unexplained existence, suggesting that Herbie may very well be possessed by a serial killer like Chucky from Child's Play. Maybe Herbert Mullins? Mullins lived and operated in California at the same time the Herbie movies were coming out, and once used his car to run over a victim; of course, he's still alive and presumably still using whatever he has that passes for a soul. (You know he claimed earthquakes talked to him and told him to kill? True story.) There's nothing to back that up though: Herbie doesn't kill anyone, even the grating supporting characters who really deserve it like Cloris Leachman, Fritz Feld and Iris Adrian. Jeez, look at that lineup - the movie is just one Harvey Korman appearance shy of being the most blatantly predictable Disney live-action casting of all time.

In the middle of the movie, Harvey Korman shows up as the captain of a cruise ship who's either genuinely crazy or a high functioning alcoholic. His character's name is Captain Blythe, but sadly there's no mutiny and his insane orders like insisting a car be put on trial and then pitched overboard are obeyed. That's right - Korman uses his position as ship's captain to order Herbie to be tossed into the ocean; Herbie ends up swimming to Rio (so he can survive underwater, huh? Makes that whole threatened suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate in the original movie seem more hollow, doesn't it?) Which at least brings an end to the sequence on the ship: a long, painful section of the film filled with the exact kind of uninspired yucks one would expect to find in this kind of movie, including a few that don't even make sense. Like this one: the kid is hiding in Herbie's front compartment and keeps popping out to sneak food off a dock loader's plate, so - get this - the dock loader is under the impression that the CAR is eating his dinner! This set-up would be fine I guess, except that the car is alive, so is the idea of it eating someone's dinner that far away from the general magical concept of the film?

If you asked me, just off the top of my head, who I pictured in the cast of Herbie Goes Bananas I'm pretty sure I'd say "I don't know, Harvey Korman?" John Vernon is more of a surprise. What, John Vernon's in this? Oh yeah...I knew there was a reason I checked this movie out from the library, only to promptly turn and walk away without a word when the librarian earnestly inquired how I enjoyed it upon return. If I were ending the Vernon series on this film, I could have titled it:

...and made it a chronicle of the sad state of work open to great supporting players in the 80's. Following Sam Peckinpah's death, directors just didn't seem as interested in casting character actors as they were during the explosion of the 60's and 70's. Sure, Harry Dean Stanton had Repo Man and Robert Loggia got an Oscar nomination, but the best part most of these interesting actors could hope for was "villanious hotel owner" a'la Ed Lauter in Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise.

That's essentially all Vernon has to work with as one-third of the trio of shady characters following Paco, seeking the purloined piece of film that reveals the location of the hidden treasure. Bananas screenwriter and fellow Canadian Don Tait (I thought this movie had the taint of Tait about it) was the go-to guy for live-action Disney movies in the 70's, credited with writing the Dean Jones-starring Snowball Express, The Bashful Bobcat, The Castaway Cowboy, The Apple Dumpling Gang I & II, Treasure of the Matecumbe, The Shaggy D.A. and The North Avenue Irregulars. One of the only non-Disney movies he scribed that decade was Andrew V. McLaglen's One More Train to Rob, a western with the same basic set-up of Point Blank with George Peppard (as "Harker Fleet") standing in for Lee Marvin. Peppard is (literally) railroaded following a $40,000 train heist - making off with the take and Peppard's lady friend is backstabbing partner John Vernon, recreating his Mal Reese role on the other half of the century. The difference - I mean besides the fact that George Peppard is clearly no Lee Marvin - is that, after breaking out of prison and swearing revenge, Peppard is waylaid by a multitude of useless characters and campy situations. Tait no doubt recycled the hidden loot central plot for Herbie Goes Bananas, which he also can't stay focused on due to a number of irritating distractions such as the cruise ship and bullfighting scenes.

Still, Vernon gets to stretch his physical comedy, especially in the scene where Herbie Goes Bullfighting in which he breaks out the "Dorfman Barfing on Desk" expression in no less than 30 individual shots. Thankfully he has legit character actors Richard Jaeckel (the only non-Marvin, non-Bronson surviving Dirty Dozen member) and Alex Rocco (Mo Greene to Godfather fans, Roger Myers Jr. to Simpsons fans, Cory Maddox to Motorpsycho fans - I'm at least two of those) as the other two foiled crooks. The effort put forth in these unrewarding roles must have helped secure parts requiring broad comedy for the actors at the beginning of the decade: two years later Vernon and Jaeckel both had brief appearances in another follow-up, Airplane II: The Sequel (they're also both veterans of Richard Stark adaptations, Vernon of Point Blank and Jaeckel of The Outfit, respectively).

Especially when you consider earlier villain roles like Animal House, it's notable that Herbie actually gives Vernon a motive for his evil deeds: he's just after the payday. Sadly this clear motivation lacks the depth of his grudge against Walker or tendency to tease the British government - his Mr. Prindle is just as willing as the love bug to get to other parts of the world as fast as he can, so why would he have anything against him? And is Prindle really the most despicable character in the movie? You got this guy Pete, who pretends to be interested in a nerdy girl just to get her aunt to sponsor them in the Grand Primeo. Then there's icky pedophile Charles Martin Smith, who apparently didn't get the memo that even in Mexico 14-year-old girls are untouchable. Paco probably has a backstory of pain and loss that led to his life on the street, but the kid's still an unrepentent - even giddy - pickpocket even before we get into what an obnoxious mini-sized hero he makes. A useless, interfering aunt, an insane cruise captain and a gang of sadistic assholes who want to smash up a car with a kid inside it - are any of these characters really any less ethical than the trio of "villains" who are just trying to honestly get their treasure? You cast John Vernon, you better make sure he's the real bad guy.

Some of Vernon's personality seeps into the film. Shades of Josey Wales can be heard in lines like "Mr. Shepard, there's nothing to be gained by our playing games." He ends up running around in the jungle just a few years shy of hanging out with Woody Strode and supermodels amidst the tangle of Jungle Warriors. In Topaz, he played a Cuban: plantains and bananas - or platanos dulces - account for over 70 percent of agricultural production in Cuba. And his prediliction for child endangerment evidenced in The Black Windmill continues here as he threatens the little Mexican boy, at one point pushing Paco into the street, right into traffic. We've examined how Vernon's C.A.M. led to a general distrust of women, based on the betrayal of Angie Dickinson in Point Blank and Karin Dor in Topaz, and you just know his memory of being humiliated by this giggling little twerp in his junked-up beetle is what informed his soulless campaign against the minors in Ernest Goes to Camp. That movie also featured an adorable sentient vehicle, a self-running golf cart that reappears throughout the movie, which is used to blow up Vernon's monster bulldozer. Here, Herbie thwarts the villainous gang by - you guessed it - throwing bananas at them, soiling Prindle's panama hat and matching white suit.

Following the fruity decimation of Vernon and his associates, the audience is treated to the end credits number "I Found a New Friend" by Frank De Vol: "I'll bet you a banana/mañana you'll have a new friend!" Somehow, this gem failed to garner an Oscar nod the following year, although to be fair it had some stiff competition: two songs from Fame, Dolly Parton's "9 to 5," Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" and a Lalo Schifrin co-written song from some movie called, uh, The Competition.**** De Vol had practice writing a theme song about the relationship between a human and his vehicle with "A Man and a Train" from Emperor of the North, the underrated depression-era drama starring Vernon's Point Blank co-star Lee Marvin.***** Of course, this isn't the most notable of Herbie movie songs: that distinction will always belong to the gloriously subversive Lindsay Lohan anthem "(I Want to Come) First."

Out of context, when I hear Herbie Goes Bananas, I picture an album cover with Herbie Hancock in a banana costume with matching maracas.

Despite the excellent soundtrack I'd have to admit that, of Vernon's two kid-targeted/kid-targeting movies, I prefer the Ernest one (for one thing, it's more earnest). Still, his presence in Bananas make the proceedings at least somewhat tolerable; it's no Christine, but as far as possessed car movies go I guess it's not the worst I've ever seen. I guess this was actually the last of the original, pre-Lohan Herbie series so I guess it effectively killed the franchise, although the love bug would return in the short-lived series Herbie the Matchmaker, which ran for a mere five episodes despite Paco being replaced by an adorable young Nicky Katt.

NEXT: Vernon enters the 80's and his "institution" phase with SAVAGE STREETS and CHAINED HEAT

* The producers make up some bullshit race called the Grand Primeo.

** Allegedly #53 was painted on Herbie as a tribute to Don Drysdale because Dean Jones was a huge Dodgers fan.

*** Jon Turteltaub really is the modern era's king of Disney live action movies, following in the footsteps of Robert "Not Louis" Stevenson.

**** Apparently it's a Richard Dreyfuss movie about "an extremely gifted but disillusioned classical pianist, running out of time to prove himself!" It also earned a Best Editing Oscar nod, although Dreyfuss was nominated for Worst Actor at the First Annual Golden Raspberry Awards.

***** Lee Marvin movies come up twice in an article about Herbie the Love Bug, how 'bout that?

<<Previous Page 1 2 3 4 5 Next Page>>

home about contact us featured writings years in review film productions