‘The Wrecking Crew’ or — A Potentially Reality Destroying Event?

As I was still feeling a little under the weather last night I thought I’d watch something bright, colourful and easy to watch. Something with a splash of Swinging Sixties fashion, music and glamour and hey, ‘The Wrecking Crew’ (1968) should be able to deliver all those elements, and it most certainly does which is just as well as in every other aspect — the script, the directing, the acting — this movie is absolute shit.

Some gold has been stolen so Matt Helm (Dean Martin) must travel to Denmark and act like a total prick. And that’s it! Seriously, there is nothing else of any narrative consequence to say about this film other than that with rest of the run time consisting of Martin pretending to stumble about a film set looking for a drink.

And Martin is a big problem here and for several reasons, not least being he plays Helm as so obviously inebriated we can’t help but wonder what nihilistic, despairing void is powering his constant seeking for complete oblivion (everything else is so candy-coloured and frothy yet Martin moves through this chromatic paradise like a mobile abyss of unfathomable nothingness looking for self-annihilation). Martin’s drunkenness may be an act but we’re still watching a man not only profoundly at odds with the film he’s appearing in but with actual reality itself and the effect on the viewer is deeply unsettling and sickeningly disorientating.

This stomach-churning sensation of existential turbulence is further augmented by Martin/Helm (it’s impossible to tell if the person we’re witnessing on screen is a fictional character or not) frequently bursting into a sort of non-diegetic singing commentary to the situations he finds himself in that only he and we can hear (“If your sweetheart puts a pistol in her bed, you’d do better sleeping with your uncle Fred”). Why is he doing this? For himself? If so it’s the behaviour of a certifiable lunatic.

What also makes Martin so unbearable to watch is that his quippy lines, his witty bon mots and retorts are appallingly unfunny and bearing zero resemblance to actual humour. Take this example of blisteringly hilarious script writing –

Freya Carlson: I was told to work directly under you and you refused to cooperate.

Matt Helm: You say that again and I’m gonna teach you to watch your language.

And that’s the gag. That’s it. And that’s one of the FUNNY jokes in this movie!

Then there’s Hugo Montenegro’s score which I was initially enjoying with its close harmony wordless vocals and smooth lounge arrangements, but it’s so interminably and repetitively incessant that after half an hour I was finding that if I had to endure even another second of ‘Ba, ba, ba, baa-ing’ that I was going to throw my TV set out the window and start wishing the 1960’s had never existed in the first fucking place.

So it’s impossible to enjoy this movie, right? Well, no it turns out it actually is but the only two available approaches are so radical and extreme in nature that they’re legitimately insane. And both revolve around Frank Tuttle’s striking production design.

The first approach is to watch ‘The Wrecking Crew’ by regressing to the mental state of an eight month old infant and experience the movie purely as a sensation of bright, moving colours. Imagine a child’s night-light pissed on Scotch staggering about the place and you’ve got the idea.

The second is to go all in on the other extreme and to approach this movie as you would a piece of abstract art along the lines of Lichtenstein or de Kooning that has the ability to break down and destroy physical space whilst simultaneously creating tangential theoretical spatial forces. In essence, putting more effort into watching this movie than a PhD student in particle physics would on their doctoral thesis.

For example — the film ends with Helm and Freya making love on a train only for Freya to pull the emergency brake thus firing the embracing duo straight towards the camera where the film suddenly freezes leaving the couple perpetually suspending in time and space. What happens if time is unfrozen? Do they hit the wall in an explosion of blood and guts? Do they enter through the camera and into our reality? Or are they left hanging there, eternally fixed until the universe collapses? Either way, we’re immediately thrust back into the realms of existential turbulence and our stomachs start churning again.

So there you go. You can either watch this film like a drooling idiot or analyse it to such an extent you risk total mental collapse. It’s just up to you if you want to put that much effort into a Dean fucking Martin movie.