He then intends to give the masterpiece back to the museum in his will, along with a sizable donation if they agree to name the museum after him. His crew will steal the 40-foot-long painting “Field of Sunflowers” after a museum benefit. In an attempt to secure his place in history, he’s planned an art heist. Smooth may be a high-ranking mafioso but he’s neither famous nor infamous. Robinson in one of his last gangster roles). Jack tries to explain the misunderstanding but once he realizes that Florian will kill him if he isn’t Ace, he decides to play along.įlorian brings Jack/Ace to the country house of powerful gangster Leo Joseph Smooth (Edward G. Florian has been sent to collect a hired killer named Ace Williams and naturally assumes that Jack is Ace. But when he suspects he’s being followed, he ducks into a warehouse and runs into a low-level mob flunky named Florian (Tony Bill, who would win an Oscar a few years later for co-producing The Sting). After appearing as a gangster on a TV show, Jack heads home, still in costume. He’s the kind of actor who quotes reviews of his triumphant performance in Twelfth Night whenever he gets the chance. Van Dyke is well cast as Jack Albany, an egotistical C-list actor still waiting for his big break. Like Carothers, he also made a lot of made-for-TV movies including one of my favorites, the cult classic Evil Roy Slade.Īt first glance, Never A Dull Moment looks promising. He continued to direct a lot of TV, including the majority of Happy Days episodes, and the occasional feature like Police Academy 2 and 3. Never A Dull Moment would be his only Disney gig. He eventually phased acting out to focus entirely on directing. He started directing the show in 1963, winning an Emmy in the process. Jerry Paris had been Van Dyke’s costar on The Dick Van Dyke Show, appearing as the Petries’ neighbor, Jerry Helper. Robin Crusoe, Van Dyke appears to have used some of his clout to bring aboard a director he was familiar with but new to Disney. Carothers seems to have retired after that last film and he passed away in 2007 at the age of 75.Īs with Lt. He also wrote quite a few made-for-TV movies and the feature films Hero At Large and The Secret Of My Success. Carothers went on to create the TV show Nanny And The Professor. Carothers wrote the screenplay, his last work for Disney after such films as The Happiest Millionaire and Emil And The Detectives. So I’m assuming (doing a lot of that this week) that Godey’s novel is a bit more adult-oriented than the movie.Ī.J. Godey, the pen name of Morton Freedgood, wrote a number of crime novels including The Three Worlds Of Johnny Handsome (later filmed by Walter Hill) and The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three, the basis for the classic 1974 thriller starring Walter Matthau. But my assumption is that Miller found the original novel and felt it would make a good vehicle for Dick Van Dyke.Ībout that novel…it was published in 1967 as an Inner Sanctum Mystery called A Thrill A Minute With Jack Albany by John Godey. There’s not a lot of behind-the-scenes information about this movie out there (shocking, I know) so I’m not entirely sure where the idea to make this film came from. Since going to work for his father-in-law, Miller had specialized in broad comedies like the Merlin Jones pictures. Never A Dull Moment was produced by Ron Miller, the former football player who was married to Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney. Considering that both of Van Dyke’s Disney movies had been hits, despite the vast disparity in the quality of the two films, it’s little wonder that he decided to return to the studio one more time for Never A Dull Moment. Since then, Van Dyke had made two more movies at other studios: Divorce American Style, which had done OK and earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, and Fitzwilly, which had not. The Dick Van Dyke Show aired its final episode on June 1, 1966, just about one month before Van Dyke’s second Disney movie, Lt.
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