SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL 1989
28%
Directed by Arthur Hiller
Written by Earl Barret, Arne Sultan, Eliot Wald, Andrew Kurtzman, Gene Wilder
Starring Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, Joan Severance
Synopsis
At a New York lobby newspaper stand, a man is assassinated. The only witnesses are two employees: blind Wally and deaf Dave. This being the eighties, naturally the two are blamed for the murder and go on the run, hoping to prove their innocence.
Why We Love It
Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. One guy was a profane stand-up comedian, the other a soft-spoken actor. Obviously, you put them together in front of a camera because of their potential Odd Couple quality, but the two had something you can never accurately predict: chemistry, legitimate but ineffable, like thunder and lightning working in comedic tandem—even in this boorish movie that critics deemed below their talents.
Sample joke from Hear No Evil, See No Evil: Wilder sticks up a naked woman with his concealed boner.
Another one: Pryor, recovering from a faked brain aneurysm and asked the first thing that pops into mind, screams: “Pussy!”
And yet “sweet,” “good-natured,” and “cute” may be the first things that pop into your mind when talking about this movie. Because the horndog and potty-mouthed habits may be totally eighties, but nothing could ever dim the soft, genuine, and generous twinkle in Wilder’s eyes when he was on screen. In fact, it just made the filthy material coming out of him funnier.
Not that Pryor, still baby-faced in 1989 like some cherub of mischief, ever had issue filth-coating the jokes. Listen to any minute of his stand-up comedy and you’ll get the sense Pryor was ever-ready to turn the comedy bluer, reveling whenever it did. Wilder seemed, by turns, amused and exasperated by the things people were paying him to say and act, and that was their magnetic magic as a duo—pulling in opposite directions but never in struggle.
And their comedies always had a buried social bent to them, like poking and prodding at mass incarceration in 1980’s Stir Crazy, just before politics got a hard-on for jailing its most vulnerable people. Or in Silver Streak, an African American man teaching America’s cuddliest Jew how to act the part in blackface—a masterclass in tightrope comedy-walking. This movie could make you wonder the last time a deaf or blind character got more than a few seconds of screen time in a movie or became the heroes in one. Who’s to say they’re not deserving of their own grubby comedies with dick jokes?
There’s a manic dignity to these goofballs as they evade the fuzz, impersonate gynecologists, and yearn for love… or at least settle for lust. It’s just another piece of that Pryor/Wilder magic: stripped of their senses, together they completed each other.