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Seeing Forbidden Planet today is like meeting an old friend’s great-grandfather and seeing the family resemblance. Sort of a gold standard for the science fiction genre during the fifties, this film has its DNA in much of what we’ve seen since in film and on television, particularly the original Star Trek. From fifty years later, however, the movie is also a wonderfully nostalgic mix of forward thinking and amusingly dated social mores.
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Wrong is Right bills itself as comedy, but it works better as a mediocre spy thriller with occasional bursts of humor. It largely fails as a comedy because, for the most part, it’s often hard to tell at what they were aiming their humor. As political satire, it’s too broad and too tame to be effective.
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When Airplane! appeared on the scene, people acted as if they had never seen anything like it before, but of course they had. What the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams created was a two-hour cinematic vaudeville act. Set-up, punchline. Set-up, punchline. Bah-dum boom. All that was missing was a drummer in every theater to deliver the rimshots.
This is a good thing, too. Movies hadn’t been this funny since the Marx Brothers were making Duck Soup, and haven’t really been this funny since. The only thing to come close to this level of shameless wall-to-wall laughs was Jim Abraham’s and the Zucker Brothers’ short-lived TV classic, Police Squad, which inspired the Naked Gun movies.