Get to Know Your Rabbit

It's an oft told story: corporate drone ditches high rise office to "find" him or herself, usually by indulging a creative pursuit and often by taking to the highways to find whatever it was that was missing from the life of said drone. You may have even known one or 2 folks who chucked their golden parachutes to be happy idiots, struggling for the legal tender, as Jackson Browne once sang.

1970's GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT has a bit of fun with this old standard. Its creators are Americans (including director Brian De Palma) though much of the humor is distinctively British. For example, in the opening scenes we find Donald Beeman (Tommy Smothers) swamped with an endlessly ringing telephone and secretaries demanding his signature for something or other. One caller actually gets through - a woman who announces that there is a bomb in the building which will detonate in a few minutes. The caller is put on hold. Dave Allen would've been proud. To say nothing of Peter Cook or the Monty Python crew.

Donald walks out of the building with no intent of returning. He's had it with the rat race and would rather pratice magic tricks and tap dancing. Donald's boss, Mr. Turnbull (an hilarious John Astin), will have none of this. He repeatedly shows up at the studio where Donald rehearses and even at his apartment, each time with a new draft of a letter not announcing Donald's resignation, but his "vacation". He even flies Donald's parents in from the mid-West (they're waiting in a closet) to try to convince the young man he's throwing a lucrative career down the toilet. But even as Donald's trophy girlfriend walks out on him, he's ready to be happy again.

The rest of GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT is as insanely bizarre and at times ingenious as the opening scenes. It bugs me that so many who've written about this movie give away a big twist that occurs about a third of the way in and drives the final act. It's a great bit of comic inspiration. Suffice it to say that Donald graduates from magic school (under the tutelage of dean Orson Welles) and begins touring low rent bars and cabarets around the country as a dancing magician.

Just before he boards the bus for his first journey, he discovers Mr. Turnbull a disheveled mess on a bench. His boss was let go for the usually vague corporate reasons. Donald brings him back to his apartment and gives him a desk and some paper clips, enough to satisfy the man's desire to be a bureaucrat once again. Donald will send correspondence from the road to his old boss, giving the latter a most interesting idea.....

It must be mentioned that Donald meets an attractive woman at one of his shows (Katharine Ross, listed in the credits as "Terrific Looking Girl"), a rather odd one who tells of her childhood crush on a newspaper boy and the lengths she went to to keep the subscription coming even after her folks canceled it. And never mind the sensitive brassiere salesman (Allen Garfield). By this point in the movie, these people and their behavior don't seem so odd in this patently fractured universe.

But then comes the final half hour, when writer Jordan Crittenden's script really kicks into high gear with pungent satire, some of which I bet even Upton Sinclair would've appreciated. You might wonder how De Palma got involved in this, but his 2 previous movies, GREETINGS and HI, MOM!, were nasty black comedy extravaganzas that had developed cult followings. His trademarked, light as air camerawork and dizzying direction are in full evidence here as well. RABBITT is much gentler than De Palma's earlier pics, ultimately missing the mark (the final scene is a bit of a disappointment), but lands enough knowing jabs to those ever elusive Pursuits of Happiness and American Dreams.