A Thousand Clowns (1965) is a '60s film in the best possible way. Although it includes no signs of hippies or traces of anything trendy or explicitly political, A Thousand Clowns was entirely in the moment. Little remembered nowadays, it earned Martin Balsam an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Music for its madcap and often ironic deployment of Dixieland, John Philip Sousa and other old-time songs. A Thousand Clowns is out on DVD.
Jason Robards stars as Murray, the onetime writer for Chuckles the Chipmunk children's TV show who decided to cash in what passed for the straight life and embrace the possibility of freedom. What Murray wants is integrity—at an elbow's distance from a society set up as a treadmill for drones and a revolving cage for creatives. He decided to opt out. Murray hasn't isolated himself from other people. He has taken charge of his 12-year old nephew Nick, a student at a school for gifted children who sometimes prods his uncle toward a more socially acceptable adulthood.
Robards channels the quick comebacks and put-ons of Groucho Marx throughout the film, although his Groucho is slightly stooped from the burden of suspecting that life outside the corruption of society is ultimately impossible. Director Fred Coe opened up A Thousand Clowns from its origins as a play by Herb Gardner, creating a dynamically edited, elliptical look at '60s New York in glorious black and white.
