Alan Carney

A young boy stows away on a California-bound ship, determined to strike it rich in the gold fields and save himself and his sister from financial ruin. Accompanied by his reluctant and very proper English butler, they run into a collection of eccentrically funny characters who help make the Wild West even wilder.

A bumbling professor accidentally invents flying rubber, or "Flubber," an incredible material that gains energy every time it strikes a hard surface. It allows for the invention of shoes that can allow jumps of amazing heights and enables a modified Model-T to fly. Unfortunately, no one is interested in the material except for Alonzo Hawk, a corrupt businessman who wants to steal the material for himself.

A young American inherits an olive farm in France and decides to use four chimpanzees to harvest the fruit when he finds the price of the local labor to be too costly.

It's a mad, mad, mad mad farcical return to the days of the Keystone Cop comedies, on an Ultra Panavision scale, in this star-studded extravaganza. A multitude of people have been given a clue by a dying man (Jimmy Durante) as to the location of $350,000 in stolen bank money that he has buried. They cannot come to an agreement to seek out the loot as a cooperative unit, so they set out separately in a mad race to get to it first. They do not know that the state police are on to them and are simply allowing the loot-seekers to lead them to the stolen bucks. The loot-chasers are ruthless, devious, crackpot and very often dimwitted in their frantic, hilarious race. Stanley Kramer took an intermission from socially conscious subjects to direct this riotous comedy. Photography by Ernest Laszlo.