“Was that Hortense?”
“She looked pretty relaxed to me…”
Fifty-five minutes and forty-eight seconds. That’s how far you’ll have to skip to in the runtime of John Trent’s limp 1975 comedy It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time to see beloved Canadian son John Candy appear on-screen in an early film role. The title of this misfire proves to be appropriately prophetic as it likely matches the sentiment of audiences who wasted their time and money on it. At least as a film reviewer, I get paid.
Candy may be on the DVD cover and streaming thumbnail, but only surfaces as a junior detective trying to unravel the tangled web woven by free-spirited artist Sweeney (Anthony Newley). In a gambit to get back at his ex-wife Georgina (Stefanie Powers) who has left him for the wealthier pastures of developer Prince (Henry Ramer), Sweeney has orchestrated a series of madcap pranks that upend the dinner party of a pixelated socialite (Moya Fenwick), decimate the campaign of a mayoral candidate (Lloyd Bochner), and end in a co-operative kidnapping plot where Georgina is held for $100,000 ransom. Whether Prince wants her back or not is entirely another matter. After all, he has his mother-in-law’s (Yvonne De Carlo) house to tear down.
It will be almost impossible for audiences to suffer through the tiresome antics of Newley’s man-child without wishing that John Candy would show up to infuse the proceedings with some genuine talent. Newley had much more success as a songwriter (Goldfinger theme, Willy Wonka soundtrack) than as an actor given that this mess, Doctor Dolittle, and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie contain his best-known film roles. While he may have worked as a supporting player, his leading turn as Sweeney swiftly grates on the audience with very little rhyme or reason for the mayhem he causes. Powers herself registers as a two-timing tart who manages to literally and figuratively screw almost every male character in sight. In short, there’s really no one to root for or even care about.
Awash in public-domain copy-grime, Good Idea has all the hallmarks of a low-budget comedy that may have sounded good in the pitch meeting, but lands with a spectacular thud upon execution. Every character is wax paper-thin with all the appeal of a back alley root canal. I chuckled maybe three times and laughed out loud once. Hardly a solid investment of 91 minutes.
Even with its apparent public domain status, Good Idea would likely be buried in an Ontarian film vault as a tax write-off were it not for John Candy’s subsequent fame keeping it on the faintest life-support on ad-supported streaming services and DVD bargain bins. If you’re genuinely curious to see Candy’s early work, skip to the timecode in the opening paragraph and save yourself the preceding “comedy”.
3/10 (and most of those are for John)
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time can be streamed for free on Tubi and that still costs too much