Dorothy Provine

The Great Race -- It is the turn of the previous century, and American automakers are worried about how to sell their new product to an uneducated public.

A team of experts are recruited to ensure the success of a heist (of forts) in the zany comedy Who's Minding the Mint. A clerk who works in the mint in Washington, D.C. accidentally destroys $50,000 in cash, and attempts to sneak into the building in the middle of the night and run off enough cash on the presses to cover his mistake.

In this satire of 1950s sci-fi matinees, Lou Costello plays an amateur scientist who invents a time machine that also has a way of changing people into strange things as it moves them through time. The machine turns Costello into a rocket and his girlfriend into the behemoth bride the title suggests.

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.