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By Jimmy Don Ventura

Movie Critic, Stockton Telegram-Dispatch
Guest Reviewer — CMC Blog

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Every month the Captain pays me to moonlight away from the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch and gives me about two thousand words and a loose set of instructions that can best be summarized as, “Jimmy Don, talk about cars and try not to insult the Baptists again.”

I usually manage the first part.

This month’s assignment was 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which might be the single greatest car movie ever made that technically isn’t about cars at all. It’s about greed, stupidity, desperation, human nature, and a suitcase full of money buried under what may be the most famous palm tree in cinema history.

But what really powers the story isn’t the money.

It’s the cars.

And Lord help them, those cars take a beating.

The movie opens with a high-speed wreck involving a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Club Victoria two-door hardtop, which promptly launches the entire story. Smiler Grogan, played by Jimmy Durante, sends that Ford sailing off a California cliff like he’s late for supper, drawing a crowd of motorists who stop just in time to hear his final secret about $350,000 buried in Santa Rosita under “the big W.”

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Now, you could make a quiet, respectable movie about that information. Perhaps the characters could calmly notify the authorities and go about their lives.

Instead, every single person present jumps back into their cars and floors it like someone just fired the starting pistol at the Indianapolis 500.

The entire rest of the movie is a vehicular stampede.

The beauty of the film is that every car reflects its driver. The vehicles aren’t props. They’re personality tests on wheels.

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Take the 1962 Plymouth Sport Suburban station wagon driven by Sid Caesar and Edie Adams. The wagon is sensible, suburban, and built for families who pack sandwiches and arrive places on time. It’s the automotive equivalent of a polite handshake, which makes it the perfect vehicle for two people who spend the next two hours abandoning every trace of civilized behavior.

It is also the car that gets kicked, shoved, abused, and ultimately reduced to a mechanical hostage situation inside a hardware store.

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Then there’s Milton Berle in a 1962 Imperial Crown convertible, a car so grand and overupholstered it looks like it should come with a maître d’. The Imperial was Chrysler’s full-dress luxury bruiser, all swagger, chrome, and entitlement, which makes it perfect for Berle’s character. He isn’t just chasing money. He’s doing it in a car that already looks like it believes it deserves the money more than anyone else.

Watching him hustle that Imperial across the desert is like watching a rhinoceros in dress shoes.

I don’t know if the rumors about Uncle Miltie being incredibly endowed are true, but the back end of his convertible certainly was. The gun-sight taillights and toilet-seat spare tire cover make a statement that doesn’t require lowering a zipper.

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Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett, playing Ding Bell and Benjy Benjamin, tear across California in a 1954 Volkswagen Beetle convertible, a car so small it looks like it wandered into the movie by accident. While everyone else is driving Detroit’s biggest V8 land yachts, the two of them are buzzing along in a 36-horsepower German bug with the top down and panic in their voices.

The Beetle becomes the ultimate underdog vehicle in the film, gamely trying to keep up with machines three times its size and ten times its ego. Rooney and Hackett push the Beetle so hard it practically achieves flight. The poor thing spends half the film airborne, sideways, or screaming for mercy.

Now, if you’ve ever driven a Beetle, you know that it’s actually a charming little machine when treated kindly.

But kindness is not a theme in this movie.

Every car in the film exists to be abused.

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And then there’s Spencer Tracy’s police cruiser, which might be the most important vehicle in the whole story. Tracy plays Captain T. G. Culpepper, the weary lawman trying to keep track of this rolling circus. His patrol car represents order, restraint, and authority.

Which is ironic, because he eventually joins the treasure hunt himself.

The cars in Mad World serve as a metaphor for temptation. Everyone begins the film in a respectable vehicle, driving along with their normal lives. But the moment money enters the conversation, those cars turn into escape pods for human decency.

The accelerator becomes a moral decision.

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Jonathan Winters’ Lennie Pike begins the chase behind the wheel of a 1953 Ford C-600 furniture-moving truck, which is about the most appropriate vehicle imaginable for a man whose solution to most problems involves pushing through them. When Pike later demolishes a rural gas station in one of the movie’s greatest slapstick sequences, the Ford doesn’t survive the encounter.

Pike then commandeers a white Dodge M37 military tow truck, a Korean War–era brute of a machine that looks less like transportation and more like a piece of heavy artillery. From that moment forward, Pike isn’t just in the race for buried money. He’s driving the automotive equivalent of a wrecking ball.

If you’re a car person, the scene is both hilarious and painful. Watching a perfectly good truck get treated like demolition equipment feels like witnessing someone use a Stradivarius violin to tenderize steak.

But that’s the whole spirit of the movie.

Everything is too big, too loud, too fast.

Director Stanley Kramer filled the film with vehicles that represented early-1960s American optimism. This was the era when the interstate highway system was brand new, gas cost pocket change, and Detroit was building cars the size of studio apartments.

The country believed motion was progress.

In that sense, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a snapshot of a moment when Americans believed the answer to almost any problem was simply driving faster.

Now, I should pause here and admit something.

Watching all these cars reminded me of my Aunt Lurleen.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the movie, but the editor says readers enjoy the occasional digression, and Aunt Lurleen deserves recognition for being the only person in Pecos County history to treat a transmission like a suggestion rather than a mechanical necessity.

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Lurleen owned a 1961 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88, which was a magnificent automobile in every sense except for the way she operated it.

She believed the accelerator pedal was primarily decorative.

Instead, she drove everywhere with the throttle half pressed and the brake lightly engaged, which caused the Oldsmobile to move through Fort Stockton like a confused tugboat.

The transmission eventually surrendered.

Most people would repair the transmission.

Lurleen simply continued driving the car in second gear for the next four years.

She said it simplified things.

I once asked her why she didn’t get it fixed.

“Well Jimmy Don,” she said, “it still goes forward, and I ain’t planning on racing anybody.”

This philosophy would have been extremely useful for the characters in Mad World, who spend the entire film convinced they must reach Santa Rosita before everyone else.

The result is a mechanical bloodbath.

Cars crash into buildings.
Cars roll down hills.
Cars smash through barriers, fences, and occasionally each other.

By modern standards the stunts are astonishing because they’re real. No CGI. No digital safety nets. When you see a car fly through the air in this movie, a stunt driver actually did that with a real automobile and what we now recognize as wildly insufficient safety precautions.

Today’s car enthusiasts might wince watching all that vintage sheet metal get destroyed. Many of those vehicles would now sell for six figures at an auction.

Back then they were just used cars.

The film’s automotive chaos also reveals something interesting about how American cars have changed. In the early ’60s, vehicles were built with body-on-frame construction and massive steel components. They could crash through a fruit stand and still drive away with little more than cosmetic embarrassment.

Modern cars would disintegrate like a dropped pie.

But there’s also something refreshing about how the movie celebrates driving itself. Every scene is filled with the sound of engines working, tires squealing, suspensions groaning under stress.

The cars feel alive.

And a few of them would absolutely still find favor today.

The 1962 Imperial Crown convertible has aged like a Texas oil lease that somebody forgot to drill. Long, low, expensive, and slightly convinced it deserves its own valet parking, the Imperial still looks like rolling executive privilege. Park one at a Cars & Coffee today and half the crowd will wander over before the engine even ticks itself cool, just to stare at those freestanding headlights and wonder what it must have cost when gasoline was thirty cents and optimism was free.

Same goes for the ’62 Plymouth Sport Suburban station wagon, the kind of long-roof family hauler that once carried six people, two suitcases, a picnic cooler, and unresolved marital tension across three states without complaint. Back then it was just transportation for folks trying to get to Yellowstone before the kids mutinied. Today? Show up with one and suddenly everyone’s talking about “heritage motoring” while quietly wishing their crossover had half the personality.

Even the 1954 Volkswagen Beetle convertible has enjoyed a renaissance. What once looked like a cheerful little import buzzing around the ankles of Detroit’s V8 dinosaurs now earns real respect. Turns out a car that’s simple, stubborn, and nearly impossible to kill ages pretty well.

Kind of like Aunt Lurleen’s Oldsmobile, except the Volkswagen was usually running on all its gears.

Ironically, the only vehicles that wouldn’t survive modern expectations are the drivers themselves.

Every character in the movie drives like they’re auditioning for a demolition derby sponsored by espresso.

There’s also a subtle lesson buried beneath the slapstick.

All these people race across California chasing buried money, destroying their cars and relationships along the way. By the end of the film, most of them are injured, exhausted, and thoroughly humiliated.

The treasure doesn’t bring happiness.

But the cars?

They deliver two and a half hours of glorious mechanical insanity.

Which brings me to the part of this column my editor insists must appear in every review so readers know whether they should spend their time on it or go reorganize their fishing tackle instead.

On the Jimmy Don Ventura Automotive Motion Picture Scale, which ranges from “one lug nut” to “five lug nuts,” It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World earns a full five out of five without hesitation.

Not because it treats the cars kindly.

But because it treats them honestly.

That’s the real legacy of the film. It captured the moment when American highways became playgrounds and cars became characters in our national storytelling.

Which brings me to one final thought.

If this movie were remade today, the chase would involve GPS navigation, adaptive cruise control, and a Tesla that needs to stop every 180 miles to argue with a charging station.

Nobody would get lost.
Nobody would panic.

And half the comedy would disappear.

Because the secret ingredient in the original film isn’t just the money or the madness.

It’s the machines.

Cars that rattle.
Cars that groan.
Cars that leap off hills and bounce back onto the highway like stubborn mules.

Cars that remind us that driving used to be a little unpredictable.

And sometimes a little insane.

Which, come to think of it, is exactly how Aunt Lurleen described Fort Stockton traffic back in 1964.

Though in her case, she was usually the reason.

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