cult film freak: TOM SMOTHERS & ORSON WELLES IN 'GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT'

Written by James M. Tate / 12/30/2023 / No comments / allen garfield , comedy , counter-culture , john astin , katharine ross , m. emmett walsh , orson welles , seventies , tom smothers

TOM SMOTHERS & ORSON WELLES IN 'GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT'

12/30/2023 | No comment

Title: GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT Year: 1972 Rating: ***

Ironically, Brian De Palma's GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT... an anti-corporate, counter-culture comedy... is a lot like the previous decade's I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S'ISNAME, and both feature Orson Welles, first as a boss who doesn't want to lose his top young employee and here a magic instructor that this film's star, Tom Smothers of Smothers Brothers fame, takes lessons from after quitting his job as executive John Astin's problem-solving underling...

Welles has a total of ten-minutes screen-time, and upon graduation asks Smothers' Donald Beeman if he had been like a father to him, wherein Tommy's expression... the signature dimwitted naiveté more of an irked, stonewall glib... shakes his head, "No" which is one of several problems since this offbeat character, played by a naturally offbeat comic-actor on his own, doesn't seem game for this particularly strange and completely random road comedy...

Orson Welles in GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT

Replete with episodic beyond plot-driven scenarios, especially from Smothers (turned into a sex symbol here) bedding various hot girlfriends, from moody nymph Susanne Zenor to perfect magician's assistant Katharine Ross... and yet no matter who or what passes through... from quirky character-actors Allen Garfield to M. Emmett Walsh but mostly the corporate-comeback-seeking Astin... RABBIT gets weirder for the sake of not being typical...

Which it's obviously fighting against as director De Palma was still in 1960's hippie-dropout GREETINGS to HI, MOM mode before resurrecting Hitchcock-horror beginning with SISTERS the next year... plus there's a relaxing, semi-entertaining quality to Smothers, a pretty good pawn if lazy leading man, going from location to location... but since everything's so extremely surreal, it all winds up feeling rather ordinary and mundane somehow.