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Alan Arkin: Comedies
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Peter Falk and Alan Arkin play the soon-to-be-fathers-in-law in this crazy comedy. Falk is Vincent Ricardo the CIA agent, while Arkin is the mild-mannered dentist Sheldon Kornpett, whose children are getting married in 48 hours.
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Arkin did make two wonderful contributions to overlooked '80s comedies...: 1980's Simon and 1985's Joshua Then and Now. In the first picture, directed by fellow Tarrier vocalist (and former Woody Allen co-scenarist) Marshall Brickman, Arkin plays Simon Mendelssohn, a college professor who falls prey to a nutty government think tank run by Max Wright and Austin Pendleton. They brainwash the poor Simon by placing him in a sensory-deprivation tank until his brains turn to Swiss cheese, and then convince him that he's an extraterrestrial. Several years later, Arkin appeared in the Canadian film Joshua Then and Now, an ethnic seriocomedy directed by Ted Kotcheff and adapted by Mordecai Richler from his novel. In it, Arkin plays Reuben Shapiro, the seedy, underhanded Jewish businessman with a penchant for delivering stolen goods as gifts to his family and hilariously misquoting scripture to suit his own purposes. Although the film remained an obscurity, Joshua delivers some of Arkin's most impressive onscreen work to date, and doubtless enabled him to pull from his own Jewish heritage in developing the character.
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Arkin's contribution, it can be argued, was the greater, as he became one of the prime personalities of the first post-studio era. It's a shame that the school of comedy he helped usher in is largely forgotten today, thanks to a return of the facile and the physical that began with the release of Animal House.
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