The Toy

Richard Donner’s The Toy has a premise it never looks at squarely. Carol Sobieski’s script takes a child choosing a person as a present and turns it into an excuse for earnest instruction. It spends 102 minutes making sure we understand that there is a lesson here, without adequately examining the choice that starts the story. There are things to admire in the opening, and we cannot recommend the rest.

Richard Pryor is the reason it is watchable at all. His early comic work has the energy the film needs, and he makes Jack Brown worth attending to even when the writing seems more interested in the point it hopes to make. The opening gives us enough pleasure to keep watching, which makes the later change of tone especially disappointing. We want more room for his comedy, and fewer reminders that we are supposed to take something useful away from it.

Jackie Gleason plays Ulysses Simpson ‘U.S.’ Bates, with Scott Schwartz as Eric Bates, the son whose choice starts the trouble. The promise of any present he wants is enough to set a comedy going; the difficulty is finding a way to continue without making the person chosen seem incidental. Carol Sobieski’s screenplay never finds a satisfactory answer. Once the message becomes more pressing, the characters seem to exist chiefly to help deliver it.

The craft is competent and anonymous. László Kovács’s photography keeps the comedy easy to follow, but does little to make the arrangement feel as unsettling as it sounds. Charles Rosen’s production design provides a workable setting for the performers without adding much comic force of its own. These are not departments we would blame for the film’s larger problems, though neither supplies much reason to linger when the writing stops being funny.

Michael A. Stevenson and Richard A. Harris give the early comedy room to work, then let the sentiment slow everything down. Patrick Williams’s score is too ready to encourage the warmer response the screenplay wants from us. The trouble is the accumulated insistence: we have understood that the film means to become touching before it has finished asking us to be touched. Richard Donner needed to be harder on these passages, particularly when the opening has already shown how much more agreeable a lighter approach can be.

We were uncomfortable with a child choosing Jack Brown as a present, and the later reassurance made that discomfort worse. The premise invites us to think about how the chosen man might feel, so the move towards a comforting message seems especially ill-judged. A family comedy can tackle an awkward subject without settling every difficulty it raises. Here, the sentiment makes the central situation harder to accept, and the laughs become harder to enjoy.

The consensus of the available reviews is similarly doubtful, with some credit for the opening and little enthusiasm for what follows. That seems fair, though Richard Pryor’s work deserves to be distinguished from the film built around it. For committed admirers, the early stretch offers a reason to consider it. Everyone else can reasonably decline a present that comes with this much instruction.