[10]

Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage star as Ed and Hi, a police woman and a supposedly reformed felon who try to start a family in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona. But when they can’t conceive a child of their own, they decide to kidnap a tot from a wealthy couple who just had septuplets. The demands of new parenthood take their toll on Ed and Hi, but when bumbling prison escapees and a nightmarish hit man join the fray, the couple quickly find themselves in over their heads.

Comedy so broad is rarely this brilliant. From the first frame of wild-haired Nicolas Cage staring at us from behind bars, to Carter Burwell’s end title music featuring yodeling and kazoo, Raising Arizona is THE funniest movie I’ve ever seen. That’s right. Nothing else comes close. I’ve seen the movie dozens of times and it never gets old. It’s an untouchable classic with an arsenal of attributes — a tight script, unforgettable performances, memorable one-liners out the yin-yang (“Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase”), and superlative craftsmanship rarely lavished on a comedy, especially in the areas of cinematography, acting, and production design.

The Coen Brothers’ unique vision for the film is part Hawksian slapstick and part suburban myth, with a modicum of sincerity tying everything together. Unlike other comedies where the laughs get muffled in first and third acts obliged to adhere to formula, Raising Arizona hits the ground running with one of the best opening montage sequences ever, and it only gets funnier and funnier as the film approaches a comedic climax of apocalyptic proportions.

Highlights aplenty — from John Goodman and William Forsythe’s screaming, primordial emergence out of the mud and Randall “Tex” Cobb’s brutality against “the little things”, to the Coen’s epic staging of an ‘everything-and-the-kitchen sink’ pursuit involving Cage with pantyhose on his head, a pack of neighborhood dogs, armed grocers, and late night shoppers in bath robes and curlers. It’s hilarity with heart, supported by effervescent turns from Cage (“There’s what’s right, and there’s what’s right, and never the twain shall meet”), Holly Hunter (“Everything’s chaaaaanged!”), Goodman, Forsythe, Sam McMurray (“Say, there’s something wrong with my semen”), Trey Wilson (“…they had Yodas and shit on them”), and Frances McDormand (“Take that diaper off your head and put it back on your sister!”).