Never A Dull Moment

Never A Dull Moment (1968)

As Ace Williams, ace killer, ace ladies-man, walks into Leo Smooth's living room full of hired goons, he has a nervous reaction to the gangster movie on TV that they are all watching. He begins to fire at the TV, making rat-a-tat tat noises at it. Distracted from the TV they don’t notice the actor on the TV looks a lot like Ace. The actor actually doesn’t just look like Ace, he is Ace. Actually Ace is not Ace he is actor Jack Albany, star of 12th Night and various gangster movies, pretending to be Ace Williams. And Ace Williams is actually Dick Van Dyke, putting in another outstanding comic performance in Disney’s ‘Never a Dull Moment’. And actually Dick Van Dyke is really an alien from some other world.

After a night of hard work, working at pretending to be a felon, he is mistaken for one as he causally walks down the street rehearsing his lines for some soap he is going to star in the next day. To save his carrier as a live human being he assumes the role of a contract killer hired by Leo Smooth (Edward G. Robinson) to steal a giant painting called ‘Field of Sunflowers’. Leo wants to go down in history as the criminal who stole this valuable and artistically great painting. Aww, the goals some people have.

Movies of mistaken identity are a lot of fun, as so many opportunities exist for the identity to be exposed and the story to be over. Dick Van Dyke spends most of the movie trying to keep his cover, which entails pretending to be smashingly drunk and fending off the real Ace Williams once he shows up, and various other goofy things. He tries to get the help from Leo’s private art instructor Dorothy Provine ( Sally Inwood) who becomes trapped in the mansion and who becomes Jack’s love interest. Several other wacky characters add their method to the madness.

This is not my favorite of Disney comedies, perhaps because I was thinking their would be more slapstick instead of an interesting situational development, but that doesn’t’ stop it from being a very well written comedy which results in a fun chase scene through a museum at the end. There really is ‘Never a Dull Moment’, in this film which harkens back to the good old days of film making in which comedy was married with comedic timing and personality divorced from crude sexual jokes, F-bombs and just plain dumb comedy. Not a lot of hard core action or prat falls, but if your looking for something safe to watch with your kids on a Saturday night warm and snug by the fire and you find most of the new comedies at the video store or on TV DULL as can be, choose this lighthearted gangster comedy starring Dick Van Dyke (aka the alien from outer space).