Spending Time With The In-Laws

videoarchives
December 13, 2022

The benefits of listening to this week’s Video Archives After Show are terrific! We’re opening up the Video Vault, as Quentin & Roger chat about Arthur Hiller’s The In Laws, Peter Falk’s career, and the greatest spit take ever. We also have more of Roger’s interview with Gala, this time talking about his favorite customers and the final days of Video Archives. I’ve got tons of VHS covers and movie facts on today’s Counter Talk, so let’s dig in…

During last week’s episode, after talking about all the trailers on the Hostages Paragon tape, Quentin pulled out a few of those movies from the Archives. Check out these covers!

Molly and Lawless John, a classic cynical 70s Western, promises the film is “not exactly Bonnie And Clyde,” which was released 5 years earlier:

The story is pretty similar to Bonnie and Clyde though! At least superficially, as both films feature a couple that goes on a crime spree - but the dynamics of the love story is very different, as Sam Elliott’s John is a very bad dude.

Hotwire was the final film of the great character actor Strother Martin, best known for Cool Hand Luke (he’s the guy who says “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate!”) but part of everything from True Grit to The Wild Bunch to Butch Cassidy to Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke. The cover of this goofy comedy about two dopes who repossess a gangster’s Rolls-Royce promises it’s “the zaniest sting operation on four wheels!”

Finally, Rebel is a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone vehicle from 1973 originally called “No Place To Hide.” The front cover doesn’t promise much besides a dreamy, mulleted Sly:

The film concerns a group of wannabe student terrorists hiding from the FBI. Bafflingly, the film was re-dubbed, re-edited and released again in 1990 as “A Man Called…Rainbo.” - but this time, as a comedy!

Those were all the movies previewed on the Hostages tape that are in our VHS collection as of that recording…but since then, we’ve found a couple more, and one of them may have even gotten its own Video Archives segment, so stay tuned…

Quentin and Roger did, completely unplanned, kick off one of our recording sessions by talking about The In-Laws, and how it remains one of the funniest comedies of the 70s. They also get into Alan Arkin and Peter Falk’s other film, and specifically, in Big Trouble, what Quentin calls “the funniest spit take of all time.” If you haven’t see it, you’re going to want to watch this right now and see it for yourself.

The In-Laws VHS cover certainly screams “wacky comedy” - maybe too wacky, although it does make you wonder how that chicken will enter the equation:

The back cover includes a typically excellent early WB essay on the film, with admiring quotes from the stars and director Arthur Hiller:

We got a wonderful submission to the newsletter this week from listener Telegram Sam! She posted a lovely video with her story of meeting Mr. Tarantino, which you can check out on YouTube here. Here she is with her copy of Cinema Speculation – she says “Me pretending to be cool in my best iteration of a Reservoir Dogs style outfit holding Quentin’s fantastic new book.”

There are also some fun threads going at the Video Archives Reddit – I really loved this discussion on other “paraphrased remakes” after Dressed To Kill. Go add your favorites, and visit us on Twitter and Instagram as well! Or just go to videoarchivespodcast.com for more podcast info and merch. Next week we’ve got three new selections from the Archives – see you then!

–Josh