EASY MONEY

US, 1983, 95 minutes, Colour.
Rodney Dangerfield, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Joe Pesci, Candy Azzara, Jeffrey Jones, Tom Ewell.
Directed by James Signorelli.

Easy Money is a hit-or-miss, very American comedy. It was designed as a star vehicle for Rodney Dangerfield who had made an impact with the vulgar nouveau riche eccentric in Caddyshack.

This film presents Dangerfield as an Italian patriarch, a baby-photographer, who is excessively loudmouthed, one of the boys - but has a heart (deep down there somewhere or other). His patient wife is well-played by Candy Azzara. He has a rather naive daughter. There is a lot of ingenuous comedy about her marriage and her ignorance about marriage - and the comedy devices of her estranged Puerto Rican husband.

Geraldine Fitzgerald, surprisingly, plays the matriarch - who pretends to have died in order to test out the reaction of Dangerfield when he could inherit so much money if he absolutely reforms his ways. A lot of the comedy concerns his reform from drinking, smoking, eating. Her prissy nephew is also tested - and fails. There are some comic moments - more in incidentals and they depend on audience mood. The ending is fairly weak. This might have been better as a telemovie.