The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
This is the story of five losers who, for one magical night, become winners. It’s really as simple as that—which is, of course, not very simple at all.
“The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” has had quite a long history. Ray Bradbury wrote it and sold it to The Saturday Evening Post in 1957. It became a half-hour production in a television anthology series in 1958. It then became a stage play, and after that, a stage musical. And finally, in 1998, came the movie. Bradbury has been quoted as saying “It’s the best film I’ve ever made.” I’ve enjoyed Something Wicked This Way Comes and Moby Dick and some of his others, but I have no argument with that conclusion.
So: the five losers. Gomez (Joe Montegna) is a con man whose schemes work so badly that he’s dead broke and constantly being locked out of his apartment by his landlord. Dominguez (Esai Morales) is a wandering guitarist who can attract neither listeners nor women. Villanazul (Gregory Sierra) is a soapbox orator who couldn’t draw flies at a watermelon party. Martinez (Clifton Collins Jr., billed for some strange reason as Clifton Gonzales Gonzales) is young, unemployed, and in love with a girl who lives next door and doesn’t know he’s alive. And Vamenos (Edward James Olmos) is a bum who hasn’t shaved in years, hasn’t washed in decades (he claims he’s allergic to water), and is, as the Supreme Court might say, without a single redeeming social value.
What do these five losers have in common? Only their height, weight and measurements. They live in the impoverished barrios of East Los Angeles, and in a cheap men’s clothing store (run by Sid Caesar and Howard Morris in a pair of delightful cameos) there is a white suit which represents all their hopes and dreams to them. And it costs $100, which none of them has (or probably has ever had)—but when they each toss $20 into the kitty, suddenly they can buy the miraculous ice cream suit that they know will transform their lives.
And, strangely enough, it does. They decide that on the first night they own it, each will wear it for one hour. Dominguez is the first. He goes out with his guitar, and women can’t keep away from him. Next it’s Villanazul, and he draws a huge worshipful crowd. Martinez has a smaller dream, but it comes true anyway: the girl next door finally notices him. Gomez plans to abscond with the suit and take a bus to El Paso, but instead the suit absconds with his greed, and he returns, chastened and humbled, to his companions. Olmos gets to do a wild comic turn as Vamenos: he must be shaved and bathed before being allowed in the suit, and then saved when he abandons common sense in favor of booze, juicy tacos, an even juicier 300-pound girlfriend, and her murderous boyfriend.
Doesn’t sound like it should be my favorite fantasy film, does it? But then, I haven’t mentioned that Stuart Gordon, whose work I have loved since he directed all three episodes of Warp in a small neighborhood theater in Chicago almost 40 years ago, directed this film with love and style. You come to care for these five losers, and you find beauty everywhere in their poverty-stricken lives and neighborhood. The score by Mader, ranging from a Mariachi band to a sad, sweet solo guitar, is exquisite, and some Disney exec is burning in hell right now for not releasing a CD of it. The credits are the finest sand animation I’ve ever seen.
The movie was made for direct-to-video release. It’s a pity, because a few million more people should have had the opportunity to fall in love with it—but because it went directly to video they didn’t feel the need to pad it out. It is 77 minutes long, exactly the proper length for this magical story.
The star, of course, isn’t Gordon or Mader or one of the actors, brilliant as they were. It’s Ray Bradbury. I have loved his work since I was a kid, which was a long time ago. I knew that he was a master of sentiment, and of terror, and of the evocation of childhood, and of wonder—but until I saw this movie, I never knew that he (or anyone) could produce such out-and-out totally unselfconscious charm. You are captivated a minute or two into the film, and you never want it to end, though it ends at exactly the right moment on exactly the right line.
Is it a fantasy film? After all, there’s not a single incident that you can point to and say, “See? That’s fantasy.” To which I reply, 50 years ago Damon Knight and James Blish were excoriating The Martian Chronicles because the science was so wrong it clearly didn’t qualify as science fiction. To which millions upon millions of readers replied with their money and their devotion, saying, in essence: “When it’s this good, who cares?” Which is my precise answer to the question of whether or not it’s a fantasy film in the strictest definition of the term. When it’s this good, who cares?
There is a point, after a wild scene in which Olmos, using the white jacket as a cape, is nailed and thrown through the air by a bull (well, a car that sports a bull’s horns as a hood ornament). The suit is miraculously undamaged, and as he is being carted off to the hospital after breaking his leg and almost destroying the suit, he asks, plaintively, “Can I still be in the gang?” And the other four losers, all transformed by their experiences in the suit, agree that of course he can.
You know what? After seeing the movie, I want to be in the gang too.