I love the movies "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming" and "In the Spirit". They are both witty and captivating.
How can we be afraid of the Americans? By being members of a foreign naval force that has no business being in the US, but is. We are members of a crew in a Russian submarine. The captain has never seen America and he orders his crew to keep approaching the US so he can actually lay eyes on a bit of it. Uh-ho! The vessel gets stuck on a sandbar and they can't get it off. The captain selects a few men to sneak ashore and "borrow" a motor boat of some kind that is strong enough to pull the sub free. Things unravel more as time goes on.
In the Spirit uses a script written by Elaine May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin. Two rather different women start getting unwanted attention from unknown sources that is frightening and mysterious. When you put two actresses like Marlo Thomas and Elaine May together with the witty and tricky Berlin, throw in some Peter Falk and zip out very funny lines at top speed, you get a wildly under-rated movie. Warning: this movie includes bad words and concepts that are just as bad, such as why a porn star explains proudly at the dinner table with older staid diners that she "never swallowed anything." You can find a cleaned-up version of In the Spirit on Amazon but the cleaning removed much of the zip. The original version is free on YouTube.
I like every moment and every line of both of these movies. My dream is to show them to some innocent group but stop the show after each line and explain why I love that last remark, what it makes me think of and ask for comments from others. I imagine if we start at 9 AM, those of us still there by 5 PM will have gotten to the end of one movie. This way of going through a movie I love would be slow and suffer many interruptions but we would cover all the laughs.
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