What a Way to Go!

In a dream-like pre-credit sequence, Louisa May Foster, dressed as a black-clad widow, descends a pink staircase in a pink mansion. As she reaches the bottom, she is followed by pall-bearers carrying a pink coffin. As they round the bend in the staircase, the pallbearers drop the coffin, which slides down the stairs, leading into the opening titles.

Louisa tries to give away more than $211 million to the US government Internal Revenue Service, which believes it to be a joke for April Fools’ Day. Louisa ends up sobbing on the couch of an unstable psychiatrist, Dr. Steffanson, trying to explain her motivation for giving away all her money, leading into a series of flashbacks combined with occasional fantasies from Louisa’s point of view.

We meet Louisa as a young, idealistic girl. Her mother, fixated on money, pushes for Louisa to marry Leonard Crawley, the richest man in town. Louisa instead chooses Edgar Hopper, an old school friend who, inspired by Henry David Thoreau, lives a simple life. They marry and are poor but happy, shown through a silent film spoof with the underlying motif that ”Love Conquers All”. Their life is idyllic until Hopper, hurt and angry by Crawley’s ridiculing how they live, decides to aim for success. Neglecting Louisa in order to provide a better life for her, he builds his small store into a tremendous empire, running Crawley out of business. In so doing, Hopper literally works himself to death.

Now a millionaire, Louisa vows never to marry again. She travels to Paris, where she meets Larry Flint, an avant-garde artist who is driving a taxi. Louisa falls in love with Flint, and they marry, living an idyllic life and bohemian lifestyle, shown through a foreign-film spoof. Flint invents a machine which converts sounds into paint on canvas. He plays eclectic sounds producing random art. One day, Louisa plays classical music, and it produces a beautiful painting which Flint sells (his first significant sale). Buoyed by success, he creates more and more paintings, becoming hugely successful. Obsessed now, he builds larger machines to do the painting. Flint relentlessly produces art until, one night, the machines turn on their creator and beat him to death.

Even richer and even more depressed, Louisa decides to return to the United States. She misses her flight, but meets Rod Anderson Jr., a well-known business tycoon. He offers her a lift on his jet. At first, she finds him cold and calculating, but Louisa sees his softer side on the flight. They are married shortly after landing in NYC, and they live a lush and idyllic life, depicted through a fantasy sequence spoofing the glamorous big-budget films of the 1950s. Fearful of losing him like her first two husbands if he throws himself back into his work, Louisa convinces Rod to sell everything and retire to a small farm. After sharing a jug with a few locals, an inebriated Rod mistakenly attempts to milk a bull, who kicks him through the wall of the barn, leaving Louisa a widow again.

Now fantastically wealthy, Louisa wanders the country. In a small-town café, she meets Pinky Benson, a performer who does corny musical numbers in clown makeup and a costume. Management is happy with him because Pinky’s habitually routine act never distracts the customers from eating and drinking. Once again, Louisa falls in love and gets married. They live an idyllic life on Pinky’s run-down houseboat on the Hudson, depicted through a film sequence spoofing big Hollywood musicals. On her husband’s birthday, Louisa suggests that Pinky perform without makeup and costume to save time. Never noticed before, Pinky’s now discovered by the customers when he sings and dances beautifully. Virtually overnight, he becomes a Hollywood star (to the point of an in-joke about the then-fresh Cleopatra cost overrun disaster), and ends up neglecting Louisa in pursuit of fame. Everything in Pinky’s life is pink, including Louisa’s hair-dye and their pets. He is such a beloved star that, despite being warned about the crowd, he goes to see his fans after the premiere of one of his films, and his adoring public tramples him to death (his is the funeral seen in the opening scene).

After listening to her story, Dr. Steffanson proposes to Louisa, assuming that she’ll say yes as she’s agreed to marry four men already. She turns him down, which he declares to be progress, and he falls and is knocked unconscious. In comes the janitor, whom Louisa recognizes as Leonard Crawley, no longer the wealthy man he used to be. He credits her and Thoreau for his life being successful, as it’s simple.

Leonard and Louisa marry and live a poor but idyllic, simplified life on a farm with their four children. The story ends when Leonard apparently strikes oil with his tractor (he’s distracted by reading Thoreau and one of the tires grinds into the ground). Louisa becomes distraught, thinking that her curse has struck again, until oil company representatives drive up and inform them that Leonard has merely punctured the company’s pipeline. They rejoice, as they’re still poor but happy.

1964

PG

9321337080543

Movie

2018-02-07 21:46:53

2.35:1

106

Australia

~$20.00

2026-01-26

2018-02-07 21:46:53