Tom Smothers

(On Cable TV, August 2022) Pleasantly weird, Get to Know Your Rabbit is notable for being an early studio effort from director Brian de Palma, directing someone else’s script. No one will be surprised, in reading about the film’s production history, to find out that de Palma got in arguments with star Tom Smothers, hated working with the studio, saw the film languish on shelves for two years, and spent the next few years working as an independent filmmaker (not to mention abandon comedies almost entirely to develop his own style of suspense films). Still, what remains viewable on-screen is one strange film that delves perhaps more than you’d expect into absurdist deadpan humour. Much of the story is driven by an executive’s midlife crisis, leaving his corporate job in order to learn tap-dancing magic under the tutelage of an eccentric teacher (Orson Welles!) and then travel the country as a performer. Corporate executives having midlife crises were a commonplace plot driver by the end of the 1960s, but this film gets weirder and weirder after that, with the madness getting deep in the credits themselves: Katharine Ross is credited as “Terrific-Looking Girl.” Welles, deep in his “I don’t care anymore” period, delivers a rather good turn reminiscent of his presence in Casino Royale. Alas, the film doesn’t quite make the most out of its wacky ideas—the deadpan tone alone robs a few sequences of additional comic energy, and the script is not streamlined enough to be as effective as it could be. Still, the idea of a tap-dancing magician is compounded by a lot of stylistic tricks (including an overhead travelling shot that immediately evokes a similar sequence in Palma’s much-later Snake Eyes) and ends up producing something just bizarre enough to be interesting despite self-defeating pacing and plotting issues. De Palma fans will not be disappointed… much.