Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Last week's movie in question, Who's Harry Crumb? (1989), has everything you'd expect a late '80s comedy to have, like lame jokes with painfully obvious setups, a supporting cast straining at the seams to be funny, and a soundtrack so terrible you wish they'd never invented the synthesizer. (Also, a poster with a scene that doesn't exist in the film.) So the question is begged: Why use it for the quiz?

The answer is its star, John Candy, one of the funniest men who ever lived. And as imperfect as this little private-eye spoof is, for better or worse, Who's Harry Crumb? may be the purest example of his comedy outside of his work on SCTV.

The sad truth is that none of Candy's films lived up to the great days of SCTV, and the ones that were the biggest hits-- the John Hughes stuff like Planes, Trains & Automobiles-- were the least like that wonderful show. Who's Harry Crumb? at least tried for SCTV-style genre parody, with the original's combination of crazy slapstick and character-based humor fuelled by a good makeup department.

Stupid detective Harry Crumb isn't in the same league as SCTV greats like Johnny LaRue and Doctor Tongue, but he's a lot closer to it than Uncle Buck. Plus, the movie's generic kidnapped-daughter plot gave Candy more chances than the Hughes movies to method-dress like he did on the show. Five years later, he died on the set of another bad movie-- Who's Harry Crumb? was the only one of his films Candy produced. Who knows what the second try might have been like.

I'll leave it up to you to search youtube for John Candy and SCTV clips-- they're everywhere, and they're all funny. (Okay, since you insist, here's one of my faves, John as Orson Welles). The Candy video I want to share is a 35-second clip from Canadian news, posted by the guy who gets the autograph at the end. Watch this, and compare it with the celebrity behavior you see today.

Lots of Candy fans, not so many of the film, so congratulations and one free disguise to the following winners: Wayne Palmer, Song-Un Lee, greg, Kenneth Gramer, Bob Redwing, John Seffl, ron frigstad, Michael Mattson, Joe Rosenberg, Nick Rupar, Bill Hearne, Doug Smith, Paul Rignell, Thomas Miller, Fred Lorence, Nancy Louise Rutherford, Dave Mallow, Justin Cullen-Benson, The Curmudgeon, E. Yarber, Mark Gisleson, and Stacy Sarette.