DVDFile

Image / 102 Minutes / 1982 / Rated PG / Street Date: January 24, 2012

I guess when you've been around Hollywood for over forty years, there's bound to be those films that no one remembers you actually directed. For Richard Donner, many will be surprised that he's already in his 70s and has directed episodes of some of the most popular television show in history, including The Twilight Zone, Wild Wild West and yes, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (I should be hearing from some lawyer for digging that factoid up). Yet most people my age know Donner from his 80s work, including the Lethal Weapon series, The Goonies, and Ladyhawke, but I had no idea that in 1982 he directed Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor in The Toy.

Pryor plays Jack Browne, a struggling newspaper writer who trying to make ends meet. After he is informed that his house is going to be auctioned off, he goes out to find a real job and applies for the position of cleaning lady at Bates Industries, which is run by a rich curmudgeon named U.S. Bates (Jackie Gleason). After a disastrous and humiliating first day where he was forced to dress in a maid's uniform, Mr. Bates fires him. But Bates' right hand man, Mr. Morehouse (Ned Beatty), keeps him on the payroll by assigning him to janitor duty at one of Bates' multiple stores. As fate would have it, Bates' young son is coming to town, and that's where the fun begins.

Eric (Scott Schwartz), is the very definition of a spoiled brat. Whatever he wants, he gets, and promptly. When Eric finds Jack messing around in the toy department of his father's store, he decides he wants to buy him for his own amusement. To say the least, Jack finds this even more humiliating that the days previous events, but he needs $10,000 to save his house. Rather mawkish, The Toy develops into a story about valuing friendship and establishing strong family bonds, which adds a little more depth to this movie than it would if it were just a innocuous comedy.

Aside from Gleason and Pryor, the supporting cast is a bunch of people I've never heard of, but Wilfred Hyde-White as Barkley and Karen Leslie-Lyttle as the sex-starved Fraulein are great. And this film now has a bit of the gawk factor, as the young Schwartz has since gone on to a career as an adult film star and the subject of his very own tawdry E! True Hollywood Story. In any case, Richard Donner does an admirable job of balancing a comedy that could have easily become a true mess.