Hooked to the Silver Screen I 6 I Yellowbeard (1983)
A while back I included Yellowbeard on my list of worst movies of all time. Having watched it again for the first time in decades…it’s still one of the worst movies of all time. This is in no small part because it doesn’t live up to its enormous potential. The movie stars almost all the major comedic actors from Young Frankenstein (notably not including Gene Wilder) and Monty Python, plus Cheech and Chong and a boatload of other recognizable comedians with long histories of being funny. Perhaps their styles clash, perhaps they lacked good writing and direction, or perhaps their timing was all somehow remarkably off. Whatever the reasons, the movie is painfully unfunny.
To the extent the plot matters, it’s a pirate movie parody. Graham Chapman stars as the pirate Yellowbeard. After a career of racking up heinous crimes and stealing enormous amounts of treasure, Yellowbeard was imprisoned…for tax evasion (one of the few funny jokes in the movie). 20 years later he was slated to be released, but a British agent (played by Eric Idle) comes up with a plan to find the now-buried treasure by extending Yellowbeard’s sentence, leading him to escape and head to the treasure, with Idle’s character secretly following.
OK, we can stop there for a moment. If Yellowbeard could so easily escape, why didn’t he do so already? And why would he head to the treasure only upon escape rather than release? A comedy doesn’t have to be logical, but this is one of the all-too characteristic illogical plot devices that are so conspicuous as to be distracting. A nearly identical sequence of events could have followed had Idle’s character simply revealed his plot to follow Yellowbeard upon his release.
Monty Python never really relied on logic. Indeed, the group mastered surreal illogic to tremendous comedic effect. That’s not what’s happening in Yellowbeard. Instead of highlighting absurdity, sequence after sequence in the movie simply seems pointless. John Cleese plays a blind man named Pew. the character is introduced as having superhuman hearing, so as to be able to better understand his surroundings than someone with sight. He also demonstrates superhuman fighting skills in the dark— he kills an entire room full of ruffians, once he tricks them into closing the blinds and extinguishing the lights. The joke, to the extent that there is a joke, is that the blind man is defying expectations. Instead of being impeded by a disability, he turns out to be greatly strengthened by it.
But Cleese apparently signed up to be only in part of the movie, so his character had to be killed off. This is done by Yellowbeard’s rivals, played by Marty Feldman and Peter Boyle (Igor and the Monster in Young Frankenstein). Feldman blows a horn in Pew’s ear, while Boyle holds Pew’s own gravestone where Pew taps it with his walking stick, misdirecting Pew into a bomb-laden shack, where he’s blown to bits. So now we’re supposed to be laughing at Pew because he’s blind. Not only is this mean-spirited (there’s a lot of that in this movie), but it’s a complete reversal of how the character was set up. Not only was Pew’s fatal flaw what moments earlier had been his strength, but it’s hard not to wonder why he didn’t just swing around and belt Marty Feldman. It’s confusing, and not very funny.
It’s not that the movie is devoid of any humor at all. There are stretches of rat-a-tat jokes and gags, and some of them land. In one scene, Yellowbeard’s wife (played by Madeline Khan (Madeline Khan!) visits him in prison. Yellowbeard greets her by saying, “You again? To which she replies, “I haven’t seen you in 15 years.” Resigned, Yellowbeard retorts, “Well, what is it this time?” That’s funny. Sadly there’s too little of this type of verbal humor. Instead the movie favors visual humor, like characters dressed in funny costumes, slapstick, and Looney Tunes’ style gags.
Yellowbeard has some vague similarities to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which in my mind contends with Young Frankenstein as the funniest movie ever. Yet in Grail, fight scenes are exclusively used as jokes. Think, for instance of the one scene that everyone, even people who didn’t see the movie knows— King Arthur’s fight with the Black Knight (played by Cleese). In the scene, Arthur (played by Chapman) keeps chopping off the Knight’s limbs, but the Knight keeps fighting. After losing an arm, he proclaims, “Its only a flesh wound!” As indelibly hilarious as this scene is, it isn’t much of a sword fight. Arthur basically stands still, waving his sword around. Nobody is watching this for its action value. Yellowbeard abandons this approach in favor of interrupting comedic sequences with action sequences. This has worked for some movies, like Beverly Hills Cop and Lethal Weapon. I’d argue that those movies hold up better today as action movies than comedies (though I haven’t seen them in a while). But in Yellowbeard, the choreography is uninspired, the special effects are unmemorable and Graham Chapman isn’t on par with 1980s Mel Gibson as an action hero. The action scenes seem like filler.
Oddly, elements of the movie seem to have served as a template for a franchise that did much better with some of the same concepts— Pirates of the Caribbean. Taking the first of those movies as a point of comparison, the Orlando Bloom character serves as the straight man and foil to Johnny Depps’s Captain Jack Sparrow. In Yellowbeard, an actor named Martin Hewitt servers much the same function as Dan. Dan has no funny lines and is supposed to be the handsome, good-intentioned hero. An ongoing joke is his repeated amazement and disgust at Yellowbeard’s lust for violence. The biggest problem is what amounts to another missed opportunity — Graham Chapman usually is the straight man. As the lead in both Grail and The Life of Brian, Chapman does very little that’s ostentatiously funny himself, but his stiff-upper lip satire of earnest British aristocracy in Grail, and his earnest victim-of-mistaken-identity in Brian serve to create a contrast to the chaos happening to and around him. The straight man plays an important role in comedy, which involves more than standing there and acting naive. That’s what Hewitt does; it probably isn’t what Chapman would have done if he were cast as Dan.
Sadly, I can go on and on with what’s wrong with the movie, but what about David Bowie? Well, Bowie has a cameo. Apparently, after recording Let’s Dance, Bowie went on vacation to Mexico where Yellowbeard happened to be filming. He ran into someone involved with the project on the beach and agreed to appear, for about a minute. During his brief time on screen, Bowie is used for three instances of intended comedy. The first is his appearance at all— he was uncredited, so upon seeing the movie for the first time, nobody would have expected to see David Bowie walk through the door, which he does. Second, his character escorts Khan in to see Idle. Khan is now willing to talk after being dangled in shark-infested water. When Bowie leaves, we see he’s wearing a fake shark fin on his back. Ha ha. Finally, upon leaving, Bowie offers to meet Idle later in the pump room, to which Idle shushes Bowie. I guess this is supposed to be a gay joke (along with all the rape jokes in the movie, this one didn’t age especially well and might altogether go over the heads of a present-day audience).
So was this a good use of Bowie? Though he’s basically used for a couple of cheap laughs, I’m actually going to say yes. He’s not billed and we have no investment whatsoever in his character, so I don’t know what more the filmmakers could have done upon finding David Bowie walking down the beach. His brief appearance does little to alter the overall quality, or lack thereof, of the movie, but Bowie isn’t the problem here.
Rating: Not surprisingly, this one gets one out of four Bowies.
Tally
👩🏻🎤🧑🎤👨🎤👩🏿🎤 Four Bowie movies reviewed thus far
Labyrinth (1986)
👩🏻🎤🧑🎤👨🎤 Three Bowie movies
The Prestige (2006)
Basquait (1996)
👩🏻🎤🧑🎤 Two Bowie movies
Into the Night (1985)
👩🏻🎤 One Bowie movies
Just a Gigolo (1978)
Yellowbeard (1983)
Hooked to the Silver Screen is my series of commentaries about movies in which Bowie appeared. The name of the series comes from a line in the song, “Life on Mars.”