Synopsis: When a Miami robbery special task force is unable to get enough evidence to convict the many, many, many thieves operating under the Florida sun, a brilliant new idea is hatched: four cops will go undercover as fences and capture criminal activity on video. After a run of several weeks, all the taped crooks will be nabbed and as many convicted as possible. What could possibly go wrong with such a scheme? Plenty, including dirty cops who are not in on the sting, gangsters who control the real fencing industry, budget cuts, and some gun runners looking for some big money who aren’t joking around. The mood is mostly light, however, in Dom DeLuise’s directorial debut in the wacky caper HOT STUFF (1979).
DANIEL’S TAKE
So, the idea is pretty wild and simple. Four cops set up a fake fencing shop to entrap crooks who are looking to sell their acquisitions. (For those not up on their crook jargon, the term “hot stuff” refers to stolen goods.) The idea alone has some wonderful opportunities for comedy, some of which are explored in this flick from the seventies.
The main cast are pretty great in terms of visual appeal: short, tubby Ernie Fortunato (DeLuise) likes to play it safe while the tall, lanky, country boy Doug von Horne (Jerry Reed) is all about the action. Then you have the Latino cop Ramon (Luis Avalos) who has no luck with canines but plenty of chances for beleaguered one-liners. To round off the mix, there’s the tough as nail female cop Louise Webster (Suzanne Pleshette). Finally, Ossie Davis gives a great turn as the straight man Captain John Geiberger who has to issue warnings galore to his people not to abuse their power – countering a diminished budget by fencing their acquired stolen property.
On the other side of the counter, there are a rogues gallery of small time crooks who walk through the shop to offer up their wares and banter (a who’s who of late seventies comedians like Bill McCutcheaon, Barney Martin, Pat McCormick, and Sid Gould; if the names don’t ring bells, the faces surely will), as well as tough guy goodfellas led by the leathery faced Carmine (Marc Lawrence). To round out the mix, the long-suffering Charles (Richard Davalos) and the excitable Nick (Alfie Wise) are a pai of gun runners who work together a lot like the dogs Spike and Chester from the unforgettable Looney Tunes “TREE FOR TWO” (1952) episode where Sylvester hides out in the same junkyard as an escaped panther.
The directorial style is pretty straight forward. The camera work is not flashy and involves little in the way of visual gags. The placements are solid, the visuals workmanlike, and the editing manages to be seamless enough to be practically invisible. A movie like this will not rise or fall on the director’s style, but on the strength of its script as well as on occasional comic adlibs from the cast. In that regard, I can see some of Mel Brooks’ influence on DeLuise’s direction as well as DeLuise’s work directing for the stage: things are presented cleanly as though seen through a proscenium arch and the many jokes carry the scenes.
This is done to best effect during the middle portion of the film (essentially the entire the second act) where the crooks parade their wares through the shop and receive their moment in the sun as well as a handful of top dollar cash for their prizes. A trio of lengthy action scenes, one at the beginning, one dead center, and one in the end, work less effectively than the comedy. This is likely due to my different expectations for how action scenes work. Unfortunately two of these feel like intrusions from wildly different movies to the one we have been watching. Only the final action sequence, which has the appeal of an anarchic cream pie fight, plays out as an organic growth from what came before.
So, how about that screenplay? If it is one of the two things upon which the production will succeed or fail, how does it fare? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It certainly feels like the work of two scribes who were not directly collaborating. The piece unfortunately feels like two screenplays that have been driven together. For example, the gangsters and occasional street names ring truer to New York than Miami.
This Movie Monday installment is a bit of a crossover with the blog’s ConsideringWestlake reading series since Donald E. Westlake has a co-writing credit on the screenplay. I suspect he wrote an initial version, which the second credited writer Michael Kane (not to be confused with the English actor Michael Caine) took a crack as reworking. The order could well be reversed, though. There are problematic tonal shifts that point to some rhythmic differences between writers and the direction.
That said, the jokes are plentiful. Many of them still work nicely. Some of them are a bit strained, due to shifts in cultural tolerance for risqué topics like sexism or racial profiling. And a few of them fall flat due to either the direction or delivery. However, once the shop gets set up and operating, the jokes come fast and the duds simply allow the audience a chance to catch its breath from the better ones.
HOT STUFF has the feel of a parade. There is a lengthy wait at the beginning for something really good to happen, then fun times arrive, and then they are done and the crowd disperses. Unfortunately, the initial third of the picture is the least interesting piece: the setup. Luckily, the film does not overstay its welcome, running the end credits after a brief coda that includes reveals that should surprise no one in the audience.
The acting is overall nicely done. Some funny, lively people having obvious fun with their turns in various archetypes and stereotypes. I rather loved Suzanne Pleshette ‘s straightforward approach to her hard-nosed character – when she stomps out of the back room, adjusts the position on one of her idiot partners at the front counter to allow a clearer shot of the hood through a one way mirror, and then storms back off, DeLuise introduces her as the groups hitwoman. It’s believable.
The movie tries to throw in a romantic subplot (of course) between Reed and Pleshette that is less believable. The film POLICE ACADEMY 2: THEIR FIRST ASSIGNMENT (1982) plays with a similar relationship between gun nut Eugene Tackleberry (David Graff) and Kathleen Kirkland (Colleen Camp), which feels a lot more organic to those characters and is therefore more successful. The HOT STUFF romance is forced.
The weakest link in the acting side is Jerry Reed’s character. He’s a one note fellow who comes across as a good old boy and kind of a jackass. Unfortunately, Suzanne Pleshette ‘s character is the one best suited to deliver his character arc comeuppance, but the romantic subplot steals all that thunder. He’s a jackass, he realizes he’s a jackass, and maybe he will change but change or not, he “gets the girl” in the end.
Contrasting this to the few scenes featuring the Fortunato family (played by Dom DeLuise’s actual wife and kids) is an interesting exercise. In a dynamic that would later feature prominently in the LETHAL WEAPON series of movies (1987-1998), Doug van Horne is the loose cannon partner who has become almost an adopted son. The Fortunatos are imperfect but loving. The family unit has similar sorts of banter, playful jabs, and heart as the rest of the film.
Yes, there is a lot of heart here. The thieves and small time crooks are mostly loveable, in that Donald E. Westlake way. Operators who are making their moves with limited resources (and often limited mental faculties). They are often shoeshine and a smile, Willy Loman types who are just out to make a buck by boosting televisions instead of some other racket. They make the movie fun to watch.
And for something completely different, I will now turn this Movie Mondays column over into more personal territory . . .
Despite the flick’s flaws, and they are numerous, I have fondness for HOT STUFF. I recall seeing it when it aired on cable in the early eighties while I was in single digits. It cracked me up then, and parts of it crack me up upon revisiting it in the first weeks of 2018. Trista had never seen it before, and as I was gearing up for this year’s ConsideringWestlake series, which runs on Thursdays, I decided to revisit my first experience with Westlake: this movie.
My relationship with movies started in those days. They were the goto entertainment source for my family, and the eighties were a great time to be a movie watcher because of the advent of cable television. Suddenly, there were more opportunities to see flicks than just the run at the movie house or on a special evening (or late night) programming just before the Star Spangled Banner would play over the iconic photograph of soldiers hoisting the flag at Iwo Jima, which announced the time when the station would go off air. Funny side note: POLTERGEIST (1982) struck a nerve for me when I saw it because I had been regularly staying up late at that point and sneaking into my parents’ bedroom to sit at the foot of their bed, listen to dad’s snores and mom’s sleep breathing, and watch the last movies of the night before those stations went off air. While the national anthem played, I recall sneaking back to bed before one of my parents woke up to turn off the TV.
I can clearly recall when cable showed up in our house almost as clearly as when my family got the first VCR. Cable did not start out as a digital box with a wireless remote control. There was a box that was not quite ten inches long, if memory serves, that had a bunch of little buttons aligned in a single file across the top of it – each triggering a different cable station. With the correctly-sized stick, a Dum-Dum lollypop was just about perfect in size though not solid enough to click the buttons unless you whacked them REALLY HARD, you could play the cable box like a xylophone and see lots of different programming flicking by machinegun fast. Not that I ever did that of course. . .
HOT STUFF fell into a series of cops and robbers flicks my parents watched, and since it was rated PG it would hit the Saturday afternoon hour pretty regularly during its initial run. I recall coloring and drawing on the living room floor while the television played, and when HOT STUFF was on, I would chuckle in between whatever other project I was doing.
Cops and robbers flicks were a big part of growing up. Dad was a police officer, so there always seemed to be something related to that on the tube. Also true crime novels like Flora Rheta Schreiber’s THE SHOEMAKER (1984) made their way around the house for my mom to read. Funny or serious, gritty or goofy, cops were always on the box.
HOT STUFF was a change from what I recall of typical cops and robbers fare at the time because it was so sweet about its small time hoods and crooks. The sorts of flicks Don Siegel’s DIRTY HARRY (1971) inspired had no sympathy for lawbreakers. Truth be told, HOT STUFF has zero sympathy for the murderous sorts like its gun runners and mobsters. However, the guys and gals trying to catch a break through breaking and entering aren’t terrible people. They’re the sorts who, after being told they’ve been setup, will help the cops who set them up against murderous mobsters and then cracks wise while being escorted from the building in handcuffs. It was a movie that showed crooks not only as people, but as regular joes who maybe weren’t lucky enough or hardworking enough to try and make it in a legal profession.
Later, I would see the adaptation of Westlake’s first novel, THE HOT ROCK (1972), and other sorts of comic caper flicks that showed the human side of crooks. In fact, much of the late Donald Westlake’s career was spent writing comedic crime stories about guys with the worst luck. However, HOT STUFF sticks out in my mind as one of the earlier movies I saw to tackle the topic with charm, style and honestly earned laughs about dishonest folks.
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HOT STUFF has not vanished from the cinema landscape. DVDs are available from sites like amazon.com if you’d like to check it out. And if you use our link to go make a purchase, a chunk of the change you are sending to amazon.com will make its way back to us. It makes cents to us, so why not?
Also, be sure to check out the latest column in our Alamo Cinema Massacre column over at the Cinema Knife Fight site. This month, Trista and I take a look at the hyperviolent Japanese satire TAG.
This article copyright © 2018 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
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