Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Micransix Crappy film

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

oOoBarracuda 1977 brought the second attempt of Gene Wilder to produce, direct, write and star in another film. The World's Greatest Lover was a varsity effort by the new director to produce a piece based on a movie star in the 1920's. Gene Wilder stars with Carol Kane, and Dom DeLuise to tell the tale of a man who chases his dream of movie stardom by traveling to Hollywood answering the call for a search for the world's greatest lover. Sometimes, it takes traveling far from home to realize that you already have everything you could ever want. Hollywood studio head Adolph Zitz (Dom DeLuise) is competing with the strapping, good-looking, Errol Flynn-esque star of another studio. Zitz decides to post a call asking for men across the country to come to Hollywood and audition for his film The World's Greatest Lover and become a star. Meanwhile, back home in Milwaukee working in a bakery, meek Rudy Hickman (Gene Wilder) dreams of being such a movie star and decides to travel with his bored and listless wife, Annie (Carol Kane) for the audition. All of his life Rudy has wanted to work in the movies and be a star, he daydreams of stardom so much he neglects his work and is unable to keep a job. Rudy ends up getting a screen test, and as his excitement builds with his dream getting closer to reality, his wife is sucked into the Hollywood lifestyle and attempts to have an affair with the famous screen actor Rudolph Valentino. Realizing that he is losing grip on the life he has in search of the life he longs for, Rudy must make the decision to leave his dream in his head, or risk losing everything to chase it.What to say about The World's Greatest Lover, you can tell Gene Wilder was incredibly ambitious and wanted to become a director. Much like The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, Wilder was unhinged in this venture and clearly does better starring in a film that he is not directing. He would have been better if deciding to continue directing not having a starring role in the film. The film starts out with a good premise, then loses its story with poor fluidity and wild performances from all actors involved. There were a few good gags, and it was a nice homage to classic silent cinema, but not much else shines in this film. The directing bug definitely bit Wilder, and clearly sucked too much blood. As much as I love Wilder as an actor and writer, he falters in the director's chair.

ptb-8 Fox execs and shareholders in 1977 must have thrown their collective hands in the air when presented with this infantile vanity project from a clearly unrestrained Gene Wilder: he wrote directed and starred in this excruciating and labored so called comedy and it is a blueprint for NOT allowing temporarily popular 'comedians' free reign to be auteurs. Just because he was funny in the clever Brooks/Kahn comedies does not automatically make him funny on his own...and this proves it beyond doubt. The Fox Studios art direction and set design of the 20s is lovingly crafted and expensively produced..... ...and then Wilder runs around like a neurotic infant, screaming and spluttering stomping all over the cast and extras like a male Lina Lamont at a jazz baby Bar Mitzvah.After Fox's expensive disasters AT LONG LAST LOVE and LUCKY LADY of the previous two years the studio management must have been chewing the palm trees on the lot down to the roots after previewing this. Thank God STAR WARS was on the horizon to bail Fox out of that money pit. In Australia Fox was SO embarrassed by this fiasco it was not released and sat on the shelf waiting for some sympathetic cinema owner to volunteer showing it...and here the other Wilder/Mel Brooks were huge successes. If ever a film needed Madeline Kahn and Mel brooks it is this. Instead we get more of the Huntz Hall level mugging from Dom Deluise that sent the planet mad in other painful misfires like SEXTETTE or THE END. This film should in Jewish comedy parlance be called THE WORLD'S GREATEST LIVER and chopped up accordingly. It is the same sort of ghastly and expensive mindset that also gave us HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK. Kids today, or even 30 year olds would just spit at the TV if you showed this to them, so rightly disgusted at the lame babyish drivel Wilder seems to think is his genius. I love fun / bad films and this is NOT one.

snowboarderbo ok maybe not really but it sure felt like it the first 60 or 70 times i saw it as a kid on cable i loved this movie cause it was so freakin funny i watched it over and over and over again laughing myself hysterical every time and then when i saw it like 15 years later i laughed so hard i broke a rib laughing ok maybe not really but it sure felt like it ya know what i'm sayin

milescorn Wilder should have more like this one, it is his best, up there with Blazing Saddles, Stir Crazy, Willy Wonka, Young Frankinstien. The only other film that rivels this one is Sherlocks Holms Smarter Brother. See this film today, it airs on the FXM: Movies From Fox. Highly recomended!