Harry Monroe (Richard Pryor) is an out of work New York actor, recently fired from his catering gig after his marijuana stash is mistaken for oregano and ends up in the soup. Skip Donahoe (Gene Wilder) is his aspiring playwright best friend, also recently fired after he ends up accusing the wrong woman of shoplifting from the department store where he moonlights as an undercover security.

With nothing to lose, the pair decide to leave the Big Apple and journey to Hollywood. But when their van breaks down in Arizona, Harry and Skip are forced to take a promo job at a local bank dressed as woodpeckers. When bank robbers use their outfits for an audacious and violent heist, the duo find themselves convicted of a crime they did not commit, sentenced to 100-plus years in prison with almost no hope of being set free.

CRITIQUE

I’d never seen Stir Crazy. I’ve watched and loved Silver Streak, I’ve seen See No Evil, Hear No Evil, I’ve even sat somehow sat through Another You in its entirety (no small feat, let me tell you), but for whatever reason I’ve never watched the pair’s most famous and popular motion picture Stir Crazy. For whatever reason I’d just never gotten around to it, and in all honesty I can’t really say why that is.

With the arrival of Image Entertainment’s Blu-ray of this still quite popular Columbia Pictures release, I have now watched all four of the Pryor/Wilder comedies and, suffice to say, Silver Streak is still my favorite. At the same time, Stir Crazy is a total hoot that gets better and better as it goes along, and as absurd as Bruce Jay Friedman’s loopy script is the fact it is built on character and situation, that it celebrates its characters instead of making fun of them, that it doesn’t try to explain them or forgive their wrongdoings, all of that ends up making the film – confidently directed by Sidney Poitier – a heck of a lot better than it arguably has any right to be.

Forget about the fact the movie makes no sense, that Harry and Skip are sent to prison with nothing so much as a trial. Disregard that all the public enthusiasm for a ‘prison rodeo’ is borderline absurd. Don’t worry about the fact that the inmates at the prison treat our two heroes as something akin to royalty or that they all act in a more humane sort of manner than the prison guards (led by cranky Craig T. Nelson) do. Ignore that the rodeo-obsessed warden (an excited Barry Corbin) is nothing more than a buffoon in a three-piece suit.

The bottom line is that this movie is an absurdist hoot. Poitier and Friedman gleefully break convention by making Pryor the level-headed everyman and Wilder the athletically inclined simpleton. They also make the central inmates intriguing, pathos-ridden figures one wants to know more about, even Georg Sanford Brown’s fey homosexual rather groundbreaking in all the ways that truly matter (his kiss with Pryor a daring foray into the forbidden African American actors for the most part in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and early ‘00s went out of their way to avoid).

Most of all, though, and without question the most important factor here, is that the movie is very, very funny. Pryor and Wilder work together with a canny ease bordering on brilliant, and even though neither apparently enjoyed the other’s company in real life as far as their cinematic livelihoods were concerned they were as close to a perfect comedic duo as any the latter three decades of the twentieth century has ever produced. Stir Crazy isn’t perfect, it doesn’t bother making a lick of sense, but it’s still incredibly enjoyable, and I can see why it was such a gigantic box office hit in 1980 and continues to be a cherished favorite three-plus decades after the fact.

THE VIDEO

Stir Crazy is presented on a single-layer 25GB Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video with a 1.85:1/1080p transfer. I’m not sure how Sony stores their prints, but whatever they’re doing other studios should sure as heck take notice. The simple fact is that the majority of these hi-def transfers doled out to Image Entertainment are pretty darn terrific, and I can’t imagine either studio is spending a heck of a lot of dough on the restoration front. Nonetheless, this is a strong transfer and one fans of the film will be extremely pleased with.

THE AUDIO

Stir Crazy comes to Blu-ray in English LPCM Mono and includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

There are no extras included with this release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Stir Crazy is Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder’s second film together; it is also their best. Silly and absurd, more Hope and Crosby on the road to prison than it is anything else, director Sidney Poitier still does a fine job of handling all these nonsensical shenanigans, allowing his two stars to riff like comedic jazz artists elevating the material to a plateau it wouldn’t have ascended to, otherwise.