Made For Each Other (1971)

Can two therapy session flunk-outs (Taylor&Bologna) at last find happiness, maybe with each other?Hilarious original. I laughed from beginning to end. It may be New York centered, but the humor has broad everyday appeal. Take that family dinner at Giggy's (Bologna) parents, a feast from heck. Catch the guys at the table. Think they're going to miss a bite with all the hysterical women yelling and crying around them. Heck no. They just keep chomping away like all the bickering and hubbub is an everyday event, which it probably is.What a beautifully observed narrative. Note how often the camera focuses on reactions to the speaker instead of the speaker herself. Some of those expressions are priceless, especially during that wacky therapy session that ends up in a group dog-pile. Or catch Panda's (Taylor) cheesy nightclub act, where the humiliated Giggie wishes he could disappear but doesn't know where the magic might come from. The movie's really a series of these hilarious set-ups, as the two balky lovebirds try to figure out who they are.But no wonder they have an identity problem. In hilarious flashback, we learn how the two hapless kids are bombarded by humorously unfulfilled parents. As a result, Panda chases fame with the world's worst show-biz act, while a confused Giggie goes from the priesthood to Black Power to the Marines and into therapy.The movie's also poignant at times and in a non-sappy way. Since each of the lovebirds figures the other is just temporary, they're constantly demeaning the other in thoughtless ways. Of course, it's usually done in humorous fashion, as when Panda dumps the naked Giggie onto her bedroom floor and into the clutches of her addled mother, while she rushes off to her existential nightclub act. Actually, they keep bumping off one another like a couple of careening billiard balls.I expect Taylor and Bologna worked their own relationship into the material. But whatever the source, the movie's expertly done, with a comedic flavor unlike any I've seen. In fact, the 100-minutes holds up surprisingly well, even after four decades, probably because it's so richly human as some might say, with just the right touch throughout. Anyway, in my little book, the movie's a genuine sleeper from start to finish.

I haven't seen this film since it came out in 1971; my mouth dropped open. One of your reviewers said it is a virtual gem but that's wrong--nothing virtual about it, it's a REAL gem! Maybe the funniest, most intelligent, poignant, true-to-life film I've ever seen. Just a couple of scenes...As the film opens, Joseph Bologna is graduating from Brooklyn College (I think) and is standing, in gown and mortarboard, with his two proud, obviously much less educated Italian-American parents. Being a proud, prickly adolescent, he idiotically uses this joyous landmark family occasion to start a nasty argument in which he rants against his baffled parents, warning them of what is going to happen to people like them when people like him righteously rise up to end the wrongs they have been enduring. The topper is that the viewer notices he is wearing, under his gown, a necklace of shark's teeth, a la Black Panther terrorists (remember them?).Then we meet his girlfriend, Renee Taylor (in real life, co-writer and long-time wife). She is this neurotic, psychoanalytically-oriented, minimally talented, would-be actress. Also a pushy Jewish Brooklyn girl who is Bologna's greatest booster--and would-be wife. She has developed a high-concept (she thinks) act we see her perform in a smoky, low-ceiling Brooklyn dump of a night club. The act is a series of impersonations. Her gimmick is that at the beginning of each, she coyly asks the audience "Who am I?" After each impersonation she asks the audience who the subject was. No one knows the right answer. But, unaware of the magnitude of the disaster, she bravely soldiers on. It is riotously funny yet as painful as Chaplin's dinner in "The Gold Rush" in which, as the evening wears on, it becomes clear that his lovely female guests won't show up.Does anyone know how to buy a DVD of this extraordinary film by two geniuses?

I first saw this movie on late night TV and was captured by the really funny lines and characters...all of them. This film probably appeals to a more mature adult who can recall the ethnic differences of our friends and lovers that made life both difficult and, in retrospect, humorous at the same time.I asked Joe Bologna after a recent stage performance why this film was not on video and his response was, "You'll have to ask 20th Century F0X."It's unfortunate for those of us who think this film should be the real "classic" shown yearly. It is an underappreciated gem.

Great comedy is rarer than the unicorn. Why keep this funniest of funny films from us? How about the initial scene with the encounter group and the hyper-anxiety frazzled to the bone woman complaining about the toilet that has leaked for years on end and has driven her far beyond mad. To which another male group participant meekly offers, "Did you try jiggling the handle?"