Directed by Sidney Lumet • 1968 • United States
Starring George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman
Director Sidney Lumet made his first foray into comedy with this wildly irreverent farce, rich in 1960s New York City flavor and Borscht Belt humor. When their buddy, the writer Leslie Braverman (“a second-rate talent of the highest order”), dies suddenly at the age of forty-one, a quartet of Jewish intellectuals pile into a Volkswagen Beetle and embark on a picaresque journey from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn to attend the funeral—with unexpected stops, oddball encounters, and much bittersweet philosophizing about everything from aging to the state of the world along the way.
Up Next in Comedies
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Little Murders
Directed by Alan Arkin • 1971 • United States
Starring Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent GardeniaThe black-comic stage play by writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer provides the basis for Alan Arkin’s directorial debut, a surreal satire of urban alienation and the sensele...
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Bananas
Directed by Woody Allen • 1971 • United States
Starring Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos MontalbánWriter-director Woody Allen’s supremely silly third feature channels the absurdity of the Marx brothers for a side-splitting satire of Cold War politics and American imperialism. He stars as bumb...
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Italian for Beginners
Directed by Lone Scherfig • 2000 • Denmark, Sweden
Starring Peter Gantzler, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Anders W. BerthelsenDirector Lone Scherfig brings the naturalistic, defiantly DIY principles of the Dogme 95 movement to a buoyant romantic comedy in this uplifting portrait of seven strangers on...
