Review of The Skydivers

The Skydivers (1963)
Remember Folks, Sex For Sundries is FUN!!!
5 June 2001
Warning: Spoilers
Just try and keep this straight: Harry is married to Beth (with whom he runs an airport/parachuting school), but catting around with Suzy, who also has a thing going with Frankie, who used to work for Harry. Frankie's place as mechanic has been taken by Harry's war buddy Joe, who would probably like to take Harry's place as Beth's husband as well. But when Harry leaves Suzy and calls her a "broad" in the bargain, well, she just has no other choice but to Do The Nasty with the local pharmacist in exchange for a little acid to pour all over Harry's parachute, which she does with the help(?) of Frankie (actually, she does the driving, the planning, gets the acid, and actually applies it to said parachute--while he stands and/or sits around looking stupid and/or nervous).

Anyways, after you're finished doing the sexual algebra--well, there isn't much left to do after that, except enjoy the spectacle of writer/director Coleman Francis' misfiring-synapse style of editing, in which the flow of scenes is interrupted with irrelevant closeups or bits of action involving other characters who have not previously been been seen on-camera (all but the most important characters in this film tend to pop up without explanation and to disappear in similar fashion--given that this film is too cheap and amateurish to deserve shelter on Poverty Row, Francis probably couldn't afford actual exposition, or maybe he didn't think about it until after the bulk of the film was shot, or maybe he shot the footage, got drunk, and suddenly ran across it in the editing room and tried to splice it in before the Four Roses left him snoring over the moviola).

You could talk about the acting, I suppose, but it would be a waste of time, given that most of the cast, with the exception of Kevin Casey (Beth) and Marcia Knight (Suzy) don't actually bother with it. The cast seems to consist mostly of people who gave him money to make the film or the relatives of people who gave Francis money to make the film, or of members of his family, or of people he ran into while on a bender. The result is the weirdest cast this side of a Fellini movie, but unlike Fellini, who generally picked talented and/or appealing oddballs to appear in his films, Francis just picked oddballs. Although there IS a tall blonde here that wouldn't look out of place dancing in the Trevi Fountain at dawn--Marcello Mastroianni optional.
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