Tomb

All of us have films we remember from our childhood that we've seen multiple times and have an abiding affection for. It's impossible to level objective criticism at such fare — we're just too attached to them to see anything wrong with them. For me, the original version of The In-Laws (1979) fits in this category.

Billed as “The first certified crazy person's comedy,” The In-Laws features Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as an uptight dentist and a CIA man of dubious sanity, respectively. Dr. Sheldon Kornpett (Arkin) is looking forward to meeting the father of his daughter's fiancé, but is less than impressed when Vince Ricardo (Falk) turns up late for a dinner party and shocks the table with his tales of bizarre fauna in the jungle. In an unforgettable scene, Falk deadpans a ridiculous story about seeing “tsetse flies the size of eagles” snatching up small children and flying away with the infants clutched in their beaks. (“Beaks?! Flies with beaks?” asks Sheldon.)

After the guests go home, Dr. Kornpett loses his cool and announces that he's calling off the wedding, but his wife and daughter manage to calm him down. The next day, ashamed of himself for overreacting to Mr. Ricardo's oddness, Sheldon greets Vince warmly when he drops in at his workplace and hastily agrees to run a little errand for his future in-law. The “errand” winds up getting Sheldon involved in a major crime against the U.S. Treasury Department and things snowball from there.

Comic set pieces come in quick succession, as the unlikely duo find themselves dodging bullets in the street. “Serpentine, Shel! Serpentine!” yells Vince, instructing Shelly on the finer points of running in a zigzag pattern to avoid sniper fire. In a panic, the poor schmuck runs straight back to his starting point before zigzagging to safety. With scarcely a moment to catch their breath, the duo wind up flying to a South American dictatorship, where they chat amicably with an insane general (Richard Libertini) who wants to destroy the global economy.

Classic scenes abound. There's the opening heist via magnetic crane, the uproarious giant fly story, the panicky New York shootout, the death-defying cab ride, the airplane safety lecture (in Chinese), the “Serpentine!” scene and the introduction of general's trusted aide-de-camp “Senor Pepe,” who is really just a smear of lipstick and a pair of googly eyes affixed to the despot's hand.

Arkin and Falk make a terrific comic duo, playing off one another with remarkable ease and panache. Arkin goes from hilarious irritation to hilarious anger to hilarious terror and winds up so jaded by his experience that he happily starts to go along with Vince's crazy scheme, cheerfully complimenting the general on his collection of black velvet paintings and his country's new, slightly pornographic flag. Falk, meanwhile, remains bizarrely unflappable in the face of everything. There should have been dozens of Arkin/Falk movies after the success of this one. Instead, they only teamed up once more, for the forgettable Big Trouble (1986). I opted out of seeing the 2003 remake of The In-Laws starring Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, figuring they'd never top the original — a hypothesis reinforced by most critics.