Johnny Dangerously

Amy Heckerling followed up Fast Times at Ridgemont High with a couple of director-for-hire jobs on '80s comedies, beginning with this gangster movie satire starring newly minted comedy star Michael Keaton. The former stand-up comedian and trolly operator on Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood had broken out the previous years with his attention-getting lead roles in Night Shift in 1982 and Mr. Mom in 1983. One of the things Johnny Dangerously does so well is provide a showcase for Keaton's distinctive abilities. His character is meant to be a dashing but tough, arrogant but lovable gentleman mobster, and Keaton can pull all those things off, all while giving a highly affected performance that never gets tiresome. Playing the antagonist, Danny Vermin, Joe Piscopo is similarly attuned to the rat-a-tat style this picture is going for. Piscopo was at his career apex when he made this movie, coming off his four-year stint on Saturday Night Live, with the last two years of that show essentially built solely around him and Eddie Murphy. Marilu Henner, who had just finished up her star-making turn on TV playing the loan female lead in TAXI, is as funny and feisty as she is gorgeous as Johnny's romantic foil, Lil Sheridan, though she's underused in the film. The rest of the cast is a whose-who of great 'comic actors of the period and some serious thespians proving they can get laughs with the best of them. The film's biggest laughs come from the outrageous but straightfaced line deliveries of Maureen Stapleton as Johnny's mother.

As spoof movies go, Johnny Dangerously isn't of the same caliber as Airplane! or the other Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker pictures, but it features much the same blend of rapid-fire jokes, physical comedy, and out-of-left-field sight gags—just with somewhat fewer laughs and a bit less consistency. The credited screenwriters include Norman Steinberg, co-writer of My Favorite Year and Blazing Saddles; Jeff Harris and Bernie Kukoff, who created the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes; and Harry Colomby, who was Michael Keaton's manager and the co-creator of his client's short-lived TV show Working Stiffs with Jim Belushi. In the end credits, Heckerling lists Neal Israel and Pat Proft as "Special Medical Advisors," which I can only assume means script doctors, as those two were first-rate gag men who, this same year, also wrote Police Academy and Bachelor Party and would go on to write Moving Violations and Real Genius and collaborate on many Zucker, Abrahams, and/or Zucker comedies.

Johnny Dangerously follows its namesake from a plucky young newsie to a dapper New York underworld kingpin who turned to a life of crime to take care of his mother (Maureen Stapleton) and put his kid brother (Griffin Dunne) through law school. The unique thing about this film in comparison to other movies of its ilk is that Keaton and Piscopo do flawless impressions of well-known stars—Keaton doing Jimmy Cagney and Piscopo doing Dan Duryea—yet they are also unmistakably themselves. Every piece of vocal or physical shtick is simultaneously a send-up of a famous, oft-impersonated movie star and a stylistic signature of these two comic actors. Much of the humor is pretty adolescent, which probably accounts for the film not scoring with critics, but it’s all good, clean, PG-rated fun. When I was a kid, I could not stop calling people "fargin iceholes” and "lousy corksoakers” after seeing this film over and over on VHS.