They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way (1978)

The second of two pictures that funnyman Tim Conway made for a short-lived outfit called the International Picture Show Company, this abysmal would-be farce tries to present Conway and Chuck McCann as a bumbling comedy duo. The actors get the bumbling part right, but if either of them actually does anything funny in the course of the picture’s painfully stupid 95 minutes, it escaped my view. Sadly, Conway also penned the flick—one of the only feature-length projects for which he took a solo writing credit—so one fears They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way represents his best guess at what makes people laugh. To say Conway was someone who benefitted when collaborators raised his game is an understatement. The story concerns a pair of idiot small-town cops (Conway and McCann) going undercover as convicts in order to uncover corruption among prison officials, but mostly the script is a vessel for delivering one sequence of physical comedy after another. Even from the first scene, the gags in They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Waybludgeon the senses with their ineffectiveness. In the opening bit, Conway and McCann sit in a patrol car, and Conway tries to start the car. The failure of the engine to ignite is meant to be funny—during five repeated attempts. And yet then, when a suspect drives by, Conway starts the car without any difficulty, as if the previous five gags hadn’t happened. Unimaginably, it gets worse. The bad guy (played by a valiant Dub Tayl0r) is named “Warden Warden,” the lead characters prove incapable of using such simple devices as potato peelers and tape dispensers without causing chaos, and the “high point” of the picture involves an extended Carol Burnett Show-style sketch of Conway’s character attempting to perform dentistry on the bad guy while repeatedly injecting himself with Novocain. Oh, and the climax involves Conway and McCann disguised as, respectively, a buck-toothed Japanese dignitary and his geisha companion—because, apparently, the film’s various portrayals of brainless rednecks weren’t sufficiently offensive.

They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way: SQUARE

The Billion Dollar Hobo (1977)

Thanks to his small-screen success with McHale’s Navy (1962-1966) and The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978), funnyman Tim Conway earned a shot at big-screen starring roles in the mid-’70s. With his impressive ability to play even the stupidest scenarios straight, Conway was ideally suited to ensemble work or to functioning as part of a comedy duo—hence his G-rated buddy movies with Don Knotts—but, inevitably, Conway wanted to topline his own pictures. And that brings us to The Billion Dollar Hobo, one of the most depressingly unfunny comedies ever made. Part of a two-picture deal Conway made with an indie outfit called the International Picture Show Company (the other picture being the equally awful 1978 romp They Went That-A-Way & That-A-Way), this misfire borrows narrative elements from Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, and then delivers its storyline by way of shtick so moronic it would embarrass Benny Hill. Conway stars as Vernon Praiseworthy, a well-meaning nincompoop who discovers he is heir to a railroad tycoon’s fortune. There’s a catch, of course, so Vernon is tasked with traveling the country as a hobo to learn life lessons before he’ll be granted his inheritance. How dumb is The Billion Dollar Hobo? Well, let’s see. In the first scene, Vernon gets hired as a short-order cook and left alone to run a kitchen after less than a minute of training, at which point Vernon fails to accomplish even the simplest kitchen functions, eventually blowing up the diner. Need more? How about the fact that the tycoon (Will Geer) assigns as Vernon’s traveling companion a dog whom the tycoon correctly believes is smarter than Vernon, and will keep Vernon out of trouble? And then there’s the whole business of Vernon stumbling into a criminal plot to kidnap a shar pei dog named “Lee Ching Win.” Can we stop now? Or must we dwell on scenes of Conway walking into doors and/or standing with his mouth open and his shoulders slumped, giving the impression that he’s just been lobotomized? Save yourself a few brain cells by giving The Billion Dollar Hobo a wide berth.

The Billion Dollar Hobo: SQUARE

The Prize Fighter (1979)

After achieving considerable fame separately, funnymen Tim Conway and Don Knotts made several films together, mostly in the ’70s, that became popular among children but didn’t curry much favor from grown-ups. For instance, The Prize Fighter—a PG-rated flick, as opposed to the duo’s usual G-rated fare—gets mired in so many numbingly predictable plot twists that it’s too tedious for very young kids to enjoy, even as the picture’s reliance on lame physical-comedy shtick ensures the film is too stupid for sensible adults to tolerate. Set in the Depression, The Prize Fighter follows dim-witted losers Bags (Conway), a former boxer, and Shake (Knotts), a former boxing manager. Through incredibly convoluted circumstances, these two get involved with a brutal mobster named Mike (Robin Clarke). It seems Mike wants to use Bags and Shake to swindle Pop Morgan (David Wayne), the owner of a boxing gym that Mike wants to raze for development purposes. Mike arranges for Bags to re-enter the boxing ring as a contender for the world championship, and Mike fixes all of Bags’ fights except the last one—while also tricking Pop Morgan into betting his gym on Bags’ victory. The storyline in The Prize Fighternever quite gels, since it’s predicated on every character except the villain being a complete idiot, and it’s hard to care much what happens to Bags, who is portrayed as a brainless man-child, or Shake, who is portrayed as a whiny sycophant happy to let Bags do all the dirty work. And when trite devices like training montages and a weepie storyline about an orphaned kid are thrown into the mix, The Prize Fighter becomes a chore to watch, no matter how innocent its intentions. Conway must shoulder much of the blame for this lifeless movie, since he co-wrote the script in addition to starring, and TV-hack director Michael Preece does Conway no favors with colorless direction that’s way too obviously patterned after the style George Roy Hill used for another comedy set in the Depression, The Sting (1973).

The Prize Fighter: LAME