Delirious

On the way to the office one day, Gable stumbles onto Louise (Mariel Hemingway), an actress about to read for a role on his show, the daytime serial "Beyond Our Dreams." Gable is snared in production politics. Story and cast changes have been mandated by the Sherwoods (Jerry Orbach and Renee Taylor), who have assigned his archrival Arnie Fetterman to revise the storyline and eliminate Gable's beloved Laura (Emma Samms), who plays Rachel Hedison, from the show. Laura's a vamp--and too expensive. She's recently split with her costar and lover, Dennis (David Rasche), who portrays Dr. Paul Kirkland on the show, and invites herself to a Vermont weekend with Jack. But while packing his car with her mass of luggage, Jack knocks himself out with the trunk lid.

Jack awakens in a strange hospital and town--both bearing the same name as his fictional TV hamlet. To his dismay, he is attended by Dr. Kirkland and a nurse, also a character on the show. They and everyone else insist he is Jack Gates, "the Wolf of Wall Street," a legend in the art of the deal. Gable soon concludes that this is not an elaborate gag but an alternate reality--or death, with his just reward to spend eternity on his own show. He soon meets Louise, or rather, Janet Dubois, the daughter of a late biochemist who concocted a metapill that accelerates the metabolism, enabling anyone to eat highly fattening foods and not gain weight. The filthy rich Hedisons--Carter (Raymond Burr), sons Ty (Charles Rocket), a psychological wreck, and Blake (Dylan Baker), an Ivy League type, and daughter Rachel--own a pharmaceutical company eager to steal the pill formula and reap a fortune.

Jack discovers that, via his imagination, he can exit the TV hamlet and return to "real" life. And vice versa. Since, in effect, he's now staff writer on the story of his own life--Jack can alter any adverse narrative flow with his typewriter. He and staff rival Fetterman go to creative war over the fate of the formula and the likes of Janet (who, like her doppelganger Louise, strikes Jack's fancy), Rachel, the Hedisons, and mostly ... himself. Fetterman contrives that Rachel be fatally thrown from a runaway horse. In retaliation, portly Jack whips up a scene where he gallantly gallops to her aid, only to require Janet's assistance in turn. Their platonic romance prompts Jack to have himself rescue her from the thugs Carter Hedison sends for the metapill formula. Undaunted, Fetterman contrives that, as babies, Janet and Rachel were switched. That is, Janet is really a Hedison and heir to the family fortune.

These are only part of the complications and twists served up by this fanciful but overloaded buffet of motives, identities and gags. The viewer must also correlate Ty's amnesia; the real Jack Gates (Robert Wagner); the illicit love of Rachel and Dr. Kirkland, who is poisoning Blake to death with an experimental drug to insure that Rachel and he himself inherit the Hedison fortune; Jack's busted typewriter, and so on. Like Dorothy before him in THE WIZARD OF OZ, Jack finally awakens to discover that it was only a dream, after all. But during his bout of unconsciousness the show's cast and story problems have been magically resolved. Jack is free to avenge himself on Fetterman and lunch with Louise at the New York Deli.

Unlike Victor Fleming's classic THE WIZARD OF OZ, which exemplifies the creative teamwork that was representative of the Hollywood studio system at its best, DELIRIOUS, directed by Tom Mankiewicz from a screenplay by Fred Freeman and Lawrence J. Cohen, is middling farce. Everyone performs with blithe humor and--like the soaps themselves--fevered earnestness, all in parody of the pulp crises that propel daytime TV. Unfortunately, the film's directing and production values are keyed to the jejune universe it portrays, one that will be most appreciated by the less zealous fans of daytime TV. leave a comment