The Man with Two Brains

Actor, writer, and director Carl Reiner directed comedian Steve Martin in four feature films. “The Jerk,” (1979), adapts material from Martin’s stand-up performances into a storyline. “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” (1982), parodies film noir detective films and incorporates footage taken from classic pictures in the genre. For their third film together Reiner and Martin created a science fiction comedy partly inspired by the 1953 movie “Donovan’s Brain,” which is referenced in the film.

This week’s movie was “The Man with Two Brains” from Warner Bros in 1983, directed by Carl Reiner from a script he co-wrote with Steve Martin and George Gipe. Martin stars as neurosurgeon “Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr,” creator of the “cranial screw-top” surgical technique. He is still recovering from the death of his beloved wife when he accidentally hits a beautiful young woman with his car. He rushes her into brain surgery and saves her life! The woman is “Delores Benedict,” (Kathleen Turner), and Michael falls madly in love with her. What Michael does not know is that Delores has made a career out of marrying wealthy men, then driving them to die from heart attacks caused by stress when she denies them her sexual favors. (Turner’s character is a parody of the role she played in her first film “Body Heat” in 1981.) Michael and Delores are married, but she refuses to consummate the marriage because she claims to have an ongoing headache. The couple travel to Vienna for a combination working trip and vacation. Michael encounters “Dr. Alfred Necessiter,” (David Warner), who has perfected a technique to keep human brains alive in jars. One such jar contains the brain of “Anne Uumelahaye,” (the voice of Sissy Spacek), and she and Michael discover that they can communicate telepathically. They fall in love, and Michael decides to transfer her brain into a living body. For better or worse, bodies are becoming regularly available because of a serial killer who is murdering women with injections of window cleaner. (The murderer turns out to be talk show host “Merv Griffin,” playing himself.)

Reiner and Martin are not trying to create a thought-provoking or emotionally-involving comedy. All they are trying to do is make the audience laugh. I found this movie absolutely hilarious! The cast is wonderful and the jokes are funny. Sometimes that is all a movie really needs.

Look carefully and you will catch two actors playing doctors in this picture who went on to play different doctors in successful movie franchises. Earl Boen went on to play “Dr. Peter Silberman” in the “Terminator” series, and Jeffrey Combs went on to play “Dr. Herbert West” in the “Re-Animator” series.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note that the brand of window cleaner used is labeled “Pane in the Glass.”

The title of this film actually would apply equally well to Reiner and Martin’s fourth film, “All of Me” from 1984. In this film the mind of Lily Tomlin’s character is transferred into the body of Steve Martin’s character.

Mention must be made of child actress Mya Akerling. At one point Martin gives her a lengthy and complicated series of instructions for her to pass on by phone. She repeats the instructions back to him word-for-word. The girl was too young to read, but memorized the dialogue by repetition. She got the scene right on the first take!