I am really beginning to wonder what in the world motivates some of Quentin Tarantino’s movie recommendations.
Some of them seem to be sincere. He’s pointed out a few oddball little seen films which deserved a bit more attention than they’d ever got, but some of them…
Well, I’m open to the idea that they might be some sort of post-modern joke on his part.
And, let’s face it, The Jet Benny Show is one of those I question. It is an entirely strange low budget film which does have an interesting structure and some very cool lo-fi effects. The basic concept of the film sounds promising (if eccentric) and it looks reasonably good (for a low-budget Eighties sci fi comedy).
But none of those are the real problem.
It starts out with an episode of the black and white Jet Benny TV show from the Fifties, where our genial host, Jet Benny introduces Polly MacIntyre, the girl who will be co-starring in that week’s episode.
Then they present this week’s play, in which Jet plays a peripatetic space pilot, wandering through the Universe playing his violin in his trusty Maxwell spaceship, with the help of his robot servant, Rochester.
If you’ve listened to Jack Benny’s radio or TV shows, then this should sound familiar.
Very familiar.
What follows is more or less familiar, although it really isn’t that close to Star Wars. Instead, like The Princess Bride, they seem to be trying to send up classic adventure stories. The evil overlord Zane has kidnapped the children of the ruler of this planet, and plans to use them to seize control.
But Jet Benny, has crashed the Maxwell on the planet and got separated from Rochester. saves Princess Miranda and she persuades him to help her save her brother.
Not that he’s exactly eager…
Now, if the idea of Jack Benny as a somewhat reluctant hero helping a Princess save her planet sounds a bit odd, even as a skit on his television show, then the character of Zane just makes it all seem stranger. The evil overlord, with his tan tropical military uniform and whip, feels like he came from a completely different movie — and a rather darker and more savage one, where perhaps he would have been the ruler of a tiny Latin American country.
He is also a bumbling idiot, but that just goes with the territory.
More successful is Zane’s flying army, going into battle on one-man hover platforms: this is a fairly simple bit of cut and paste photo animation, and it isn’t even obvious until the end of the film that the bottom portion of the hover platform is just a car tire. It looks very surreal, partly because the effect is so obvious, but mostly because the flying army is entirely made of copies of Zane’s top General.
Right.
There is a quick throwaway line tossed in which might be intended as an explanation, where Zane demands that the General send his personal body guard into the final battle (although we never actually see multiple versions of the General at any other time). To be fair, though, the effects are all decidedly minimal, and the Maxwell looks like it was built on one of those restaurant ketchup bottles, so this does more or less fit. This was apparently a deliberate choice, and I have to admit it is one of the more endearing aspects of The Jet Benny Show.
But we still haven’t reached the real problem with this film.
And, no, I don’t mean the fact that the rather effete and prissy Jack Benny re-imagined as a dashing hero. They’d done that countless times before on the radio show.
Nor is the problem — not entirely, at least — that they couldn’t find someone who looked or sounded like Jack. Steve Norman looks a bit like the young Jack Benny — more than most actors who play famous celebrities in the movies — and he has the voice down, more or less. The resemblance is about as close as any film is likely to get.
So close, in fact, that it really comes as little surprise to me that the director, Roger Evans, met Steve Norman during the years he’s spent working with a local theater group and conceived the notion of making a Star Wars parody built around a Jack Benny parody as a result.
It is the sort of notion that only makes sense if you already know someone who looks and sounds (mostly) like Jack Benny.
The real problem is that Jack Benny was a comic genius and Steve Norman…isn’t.
I have to wonder whether even Jack could have pulled off a movie like this, as his comic persona might get to be a bit much after an hour and a quarter of playing the hero. Part of the problem is that, on his show, Jack deliberately surrounded himself with talented actors. After all, he knew that people wouldn’t be saying, “Phil Harris was funny on The Jack Benny Show last night,” but “The Jack Benny Show was funny last night.”
Jet Benny does have a robot version of Rochester, but, again, Eddie Anderson was far more talented than whoever is doing the robot voice here. They didn’t catch that gravelly quality Eddie’s voice has, nor did their writing catch all the quirks of his character: on the show, he was constantly put upon and swindled by his boss, but retaliated with occasional pranks and an amused but openly disrespectful attitude towards his boss.
And, let’s face it, Eddie always got some of the best lines in the show, and that never happens here. Nor does this Rochester get a chance for a song and dance number as Eddie did in Buck Benny Rides Again and some of the other movies. Instead, Rochester is just a simple yes-man and little more, with a few potentially comic situations (like his being reprogrammed as a killer weapon or his comments on Jet’s final encounter with the Princess) left mostly unexploited.
The film itself looks very low budget, which was mostly intended. They shot it on Super 8, only to discover that Kodak had discontinued the film stock. However, the Kodak lab’s head engineer found just enough to print the film. It went on to win the Lawrence Kasden Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and showed there for many months afterwards. There was even a Jet Benny fan club. Later, the film was picked up by one of the first direct to video companies, United Entertainment, and ended up in Mom and Pop stores everywhere. Jet Benny never made it to DVD, however, which isn’t entirely a surprise.
Although, with Quentin Tarantino plugging it, and copies available on YouTube, it’s probably just a matter of time.
I don’t hate this film as much as some reviewers have. It is weirdly different from any other film out there, and mildly amusing. We get too many repeats of classic Jack Benny schtick, like his legendary “Well!”, not to mention “Now cut that out!”, his endless calls for “Rochester!” and even several retreads of his “your money or your life” gag. Steve does a reasonably good take on Jack’s signature hand to his cheek gesture, but like everything else, it gets overused to death.
But, if I squint hard, I can see why it took on such a strange cult following among its many fans. I suspect that, a decade after Jack’s death and in the days before home video would have made his show readily available, part of that may have been sheer nostalgia.
After all, if you hadn’t see the real thing in years, even a bad copy would look pretty good.
So, if you are into culty bad films, The Jet Benny Show might be worth a look.
But the rest of you will probably be happier avoiding it…
rivets on the poster 
I think QT was mostly impressed by the movie technically. He and Roger Avary agreed on their podcast that it’s not a particularly good movie in other respects, and more a curiosity than anything. (They were grading it on a curve.)
LikeLike
Which makes a lot of sense! But we all know that the minute Quentin mentions a film, everyone rushes out to see it!
LikeLike